Age of Shadows
by hbcooper
Summary: The Shadow King rules in a world gone wrong. Can a young thief on the run fulfill his destiny? Romy AU
1. Chapter 1

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

Author's notes: All right, here we go! I have been dragging my feet on finishing and posting this story for quite a while - which is usually a sign I just need to stop picking at it and share with the class.

In this AU, Professor X never survived to form the X-men, and you can probably guess from the title which villain rules the world in his absence. The first few chapters will be filling in a little history on the new timeline, but I'll just be showing the highlights that get our characters where they need to be for the main story. We start off with a scene from Uncanny X-Men #117 written by Chris Claremont, and some of the dialogue is pulled directly from that particular issue, but after that we'll be jumping ahead a few years at a time as the chapters progress.

Remy will eventually be our main narrator, but there will be other POVs scattered throughout the story, especially at the beginning. Once we get to the "present" of this story, our heroes are just a bit younger than they are in the 616 universe - Gambit and Rogue late teens to early 20s - and of course it is a Romy story because I just can't help myself. Lots of cameos so keep your eyes peeled!

This is a mature story because of some graphic violence and maybe a little smut, so adults only please.

As always, I write with minimal accents. The "Ah" and "Dis" can get a little annoying for me when writing or reading Romy stories - I figure you all have imaginations and can hear their voices however you want - though I did slip the accents in more than usual with this one.

Thanks as always for reading and reviewing! Hope you enjoy!

* * *

 **Chapter One**

 **Charles**

The patterned rugs adorning the stands were as unfamiliar to his eyes as the thoughts and words of those he passed by.

Cairo's bustling streets were a nonstop assault to the senses, and every direction in the marketplace Charles Xavier turned seemed to bring forth the spicy perfume of silk or roasting meat, all smothered beneath an oppressive heat that was like nothing he had ever experienced, even in the jungles of war.

It had been months since Charles left his war behind, and even longer since a broken engagement had torn him to pieces, his love life the final casualty of a conflict that had taken so much from so many.

Unable to return to his home in the states or to his research following his discharge from the army, Charles had instead run away – from duty, from responsibility, from everything he had once expected of himself. Lost on an endless journey, he spent his days wandering unknown ports and cities in an effort to numb the emptiness he felt inside.

After a great deal of soul searching, a sort of healing had begun, a self-imposed exile transforming itself into a much needed vacation. For the first time in years, Charles was actually enjoying himself, and was through feeling guilty or selfish for the time spent away from his work. His scientific research, begun years before the war while at University, focused on genetic mutation and the next step in human evolution. What he hoped to prove would change the world, but surely the world could wait until Charles Xavier figured out _his_ next step? Didn't he deserve that chance?

Pulling a linen handkerchief from his shirt pocket, he removed his hat and wiped the perspiration from his scalp. Not yet thirty, Charles had been completely bald since his late teens, a strange side effect of his body's personal evolution. He was a mutant, or at least that was what he was calling himself and others like him. As a child, Charles discovered he had the power to read minds. Telepathy was the scientific name for his condition, and this special ability made navigating the crowded marketplace difficult, but not unbearable as over the years he had learned to shield himself and block out the thoughts and musings of others.

Through the course of his research he had found more individuals like him, all mutants with varying abilities or powers. The possibilities seemed limitless – so much untapped genetic potential to be used for the benefit of mankind! He often wondered how different things could have been for his younger self if there had been someone to explain what he was, someone to help him understand what a gift he had been given. There were times he thought he must be going mad, and there had been no one to tell him otherwise.

His work as a therapist during his college days had uncovered several children in need of such guidance, of someone to train them in the use of these mutant abilities. After the war he and Moira had planned on returning to his family home in upstate New York to…

 _Moira._

Moira Kinross. At the thought of her name - of the beautiful yet stubbornly brilliant woman who had broken his heart - Charles felt the breath rush from his lungs and had to stop to regain his composure.

There was so much they had planned, so many dreams left dead on the floor. When he had been drafted, Moira said she would wait for him forever, but a 'Dear John' letter - their final goodbye - lay folded in the front pocket of his khakis.

Unconsciously, Charles reached for the careworn paper, but jumped when he felt feather light fingers snatch the wallet he carried in that same pocket. A small laugh, that of a child's, bubbled in his mind, and he caught a glimpse of a dark-skinned girl with a head of snow white hair before the little pickpocket disappeared into the crowd.

Swearing under his breath, Charles gave chase. The money could be replaced, but his ID and passport were things he could not afford to lose in a hostile land. The child was quick and sure-footed, and able to squeeze through the throngs of people much easier than Charles. He received several angry rebukes in foreign tongues before he finally reached out and halted the girl's steps with his mutant powers. Under his telepathic control she froze with his comically large billfold in her tiny grasp, and Charles knelt to retrieve his belongings.

He paused after taking a good look at her. The girl was malnourished and dressed in rags. When had she last eaten a proper meal, he wondered? Was there no one to take care of her?

Probing her mind for answers, he was instead surprised to detect the mental cues or psychic keys he had discovered during the course of his research, markers in the brain that signaled the future development of mutant powers.

Opening his mind to investigate further, he was slammed by a psionic bolt of tremendous power, the blow the mental equivalent of a cast iron skillet to his temple. The world went black and he collapsed in a dusty heap.

When he came to, the little thief was gone, but she had not been the source of the psychic sucker punch. Instead, a telepathic whisper beckoned to Charles from within a nearby saloon.

Parting the beaded curtain draped across the bar's entrance, Charles stepped from the bleached wheat daylight of the marketplace into the darkened, smoke filled space. The few scattered patrons hunched over their drinks barely acknowledged him, and though the tension in the room was palpable, none were the source of the psychic assault. Charles knew he would not have long to wait before he was introduced to the force that had summoned him inside, so he settled back and ordered a coffee from the server.

An obese man dressed in an out of fashion white suit emerged from a private balcony, flanked on either side by raven haired beauties. The man's girth strained the buttons of the maroon dress shirt he wore beneath his jacket, and a matching fez perched atop a bald head. Tiny sunglasses accentuated the roundness of his face and hid the man's eyes from view, but Charles knew in an instant he had found the source of the mental attack. Another telepath, the first he had met face to face, and the very touch of the man's thoughts made Charles's skin crawl.

 _'I am Amahl Farouk.'_ With the help of his scantily clad entourage, the man eased into a chair at his own table and spoke to Charles without moving his sneering lips. _'I rule what you tourists call the Thieves' Quarter. Who are you, my friend?'_

 _'A stranger,'_ Charles replied, his telepathic shields wrapping him in a cocoon. Even so, he felt the push of psionic abilities against his own.

 _'I bid you welcome, 'stranger'.'_ Farouk waved a swollen hand and the waiter was at his side in a flash with a ready drink. _'I own this establishment. Should you wish to partake of any of its manifold…delights…you have but to ask.'_

It wasn't really an invitation. Charles felt the warning beneath the man's words.

 _'Thank you, no,'_ Charles replied. What had he gotten himself into? Farouk seemed to be the king of his own little empire. Those around them in the saloon were trembling in fear and Charles caught flashes of what constituted the 'delights' Farouk had offered to him in their memories.

 _'Your loss._ ' Farouk smiled and reached out to one of the beauties sitting next to him and brushed sausage fingers along her cheek. _'I sense we are kindred spirits. Join me, stranger. I will show you pleasure – and power – beyond your wildest imaginings!'_

The bitter coffee turned to acid in Charles's stomach. Before him sat a man who used his mutant abilities to take advantage of those less powerful, bending the weak minded to his every sadistic whim. People like Farouk went against everything Charles believed in. Humans and mutants must co-exist for the benefit of all, but normal humans would never accept their mutant brothers so long as predators like Farouk stalked them at every turn. He was taking a tremendous risk, but Charles knew he had to stop this monster before anyone else fell sway to his power.

 _'You and I are mutants,_ ' Charles implored in a last, foolish offering of peace, _'true, we have exceptional abilities, but we also have a responsibility to use those abilities for the benefit of our fellow man…'_

His words brought only a smirk from his newfound rival. Charles knew in his heart that Farouk would never listen to reason – and why would he? Through his power he had everything he could ever dream of – money, influence, women – small dreams for a petty man.

The sick anger and fear in Charles's belly resolved itself. The human authorities could never overpower such a creature, indeed there were few in the world who could. Farouk would continue his tyranny unchallenged unless someone like Charles acted.

 _'We are not kindred spirits,_ ' Charles challenged, his astral form slipping free of his body, _'and I swear I will not rest until you're brought to justice for your crimes!'_

Farouk laughed out loud, and Charles found himself yanked from the reality of the saloon onto the astral plane -the battleground of the mind – floating in a galaxy of weightless dark that echoed to the ends of the universe and beyond. He could feel everything and nothing, at once connected to each living being on the planet and yet separate, alone, insignificant. It was a place Charles had only dreamed of, but even his wildest fantasies had not prepared him for such a foe as he faced in Farouk.

In the waking world, their bodies sat immobilized, the only sounds in the bar the soft swish of the ceiling fans and the clink of glassware, but in the astral plane the landscape twisted itself inside out, swirling rainbows in an endless starry sky that danced to his opponent's every gesture.

Farouk's astral form was spry and youthful, far more powerful than the man's flesh and blood body, and cloaked himself in a black suit of psychic armor, striking at Charles with a blade made of pure energy. Charles generated armor of his own, but his inexperience showed.

 _'For all your bluster and bravado, stranger,'_ Farouk taunted, ' _I think you're a novice!'_ He struck, and Charles's meager shields shuddered against the barrage of psychic energy.

So much raw power, it was like nothing Charles had ever imagined! The blade his opponent wielded slashed across Charles's astral form, and in reality the skin of his back burned and blistered in the heat of the saloon.

The fight was waged on a thousand different levels of consciousness simultaneously. The landscape bent to Farouk's every whim, whatever he visualized became their reality. Farouk danced and shifted the world around Charles, his psychic avatar changing shape, becoming an enormous green skinned monster that caught Charles in the grasp of his clawed hand.

Cold spread out from the creature's hand to wrap Charles in a numb shell. He did not want to die, but he was losing. Someone needed to stop Farouk, but his strength had failed him. Was there anything left?

Calming himself, Charles focused every last bit of his telepathic power...

There was a flash – a single burst of the noonday sun - then nothing.

In the bar, the body of Charles Xavier fell forward onto the table with a sickening thud. Amahl Farouk grinned and gestured towards him.

"Search him," he purred in his native tongue, "then dump him in an alley like the trash that he is."

Farouk smiled and ordered another drink.

* * *

 **Raven**

She wasn't sure if it was the frantic scratching that woke her or the empty bed, the blankets icy beyond her warm cocoon.

The alarm clock on the nightstand proclaimed 2:55 in blazing red digits, and Raven Darkholme held her breath to listen, hoping that the manic scratching would slow. When it didn't, she swore and fumbled for her silk robe. Her slippers were nowhere to be found, and she kept up a steady stream of cursing on her way down the frigid hardwood stairs. Washington D.C. in the middle of January hadn't been her idea, but Raven often found it hard to win arguments against someone who could see the future.

Steeling herself before she entered the kitchen, Raven took a deep breath. Now that she was closer, she knew the scratching for what it was - the sound of a pen moving across paper. The strokes hadn't missed a beat, and Raven pushed open the swinging wooden door to darkness. The only light in the kitchen was the glow of the moon falling through the latticed windows over the table.

Seated at that table was Irene Adler, a woman Raven had loved since the moment the two had met, too many years gone by to count. Raven hit the dimmer switch and stepped towards Irene.

"You could have at least started the coffee," Raven called out as she crossed the room, but either Irene hadn't heard or chose not to acknowledge her. The frenzied writing continued, and Raven's empty stomach burned when she came up behind her lover.

Spread across the table's surface were hundreds of sheets of loose leaf paper, so dense with handwritten text they were black in places. There were haphazard piles of pages that looked as if Irene had finished one and flung it aside to move onto the next, the writing equivalent of chain smoking a pack of cigarettes. The floor around Irene's hunched form was littered with more, and when Raven bent to pick one up, she was horrified to see the red streaks of blood following the lines of text. The knuckles of Irene's hand were bloodied and staining the papers beneath it as she wrote.

"Irene! You're bleeding!" she gripped Irene's shoulder and shook her. "God dammit, Irene! You can't see me, but I sure as hell know you can hear me!" Raven shook harder and wrestled away the pen.

Opaque, unseeing eyes blinked at Raven as if trying to focus.

"Raven?"

Irene's voice seemed so much smaller than her body, and Raven took the frail, weathered hands into her own blue-skinned grasp. One of life's cruelest jokes had been watching the love of her life fall prey to father time, while Raven's own shapeshifting ability kept her as youthful as the day the two had met.

"Come back to bed, sweetheart," Raven soothed. "I was cold without you."

Tears gathered at the corner of Irene's pearly, vacant eyes. She clutched Raven's hands to her chest and bowed her head.

"What is it, Irene? What's wrong?"

The warm pitter patter of Irene's crying splashed onto Raven's skin.

Both women were gifted with abilities far beyond normal humans, those gifts part of the connection that had drawn them to each other in the first place all those years ago. 'Mutant' was the new word the world was calling them, in public anyway. On the streets it was still freak, abomination - still fear, hatred, and violence from normal people. With her power, Raven could hide her true face and become anyone she pleased, but Irene? It was never a good thing to find someone whose power let her see the future sobbing her guts out in the middle of the night.

More troubling were the reams of loose leaf paper covered in writing. Irene had told Raven the story of how she had lost her eyesight long ago. The ability to see the future wasn't cut and dried, the timelines never completely set in stone, but Irene's special gift let her perceive different paths that would lead to the ultimate outcome, different roads the future could take to get to the same destination. Irene had thought she was losing her mind when those powers emerged in her late teens, but to make sense of the chaos she had written down everything she could see into a set of diaries. When finished, the enormous task had cost Irene her eyesight.

Over the years the pair had used the resulting diaries as a guideline to help in their work to shape future events, but a quick glance at the pages spread before them showed Raven events she had never seen before in Irene's volumes.

"Time is…broken," Irene whimpered. "The tapestry has been undone."

A cold sweat prickled Raven's skin. "I don't understand," she squeezed Irene's hands. "What does that mean, time is broken?"

Irene shook her hands loose and felt across the piles of paper for her pen. "It means, what was to come cannot be!" She started drawing. "Something else has happened instead, something that was never _meant_ to happen." Her drawing was of a straight line. Over top the first, Irene then drew another line that followed the same path until she veered the second line sharply away and continued its path parallel. Her pen traced the second line over and over, carving it so deeply into the paper that it tore. "The tapestry has been undone. The fabric of time must be woven once more."

Raven sat in helpless horror as Irene abandoned her drawing and began writing again. It had all been for nothing, Raven thought bitterly. All of the sacrifices they had made in the name of saving a future that would never come to pass. How could this have happened? How could Irene have gotten it so wrong?

"That's it, then?" Raven's tears were threatening to join Irene's, but she dug her fingernails into her palms to hold them at bay. "There's no hope?"

Irene grabbed a clean piece of paper and kept writing. The new sheet, Raven realized, was a list of names. Most were unfamiliar to her - _Erik Lehnsherr, Moira Kinross, Remy LeBeau, James Howlett, Charles Xavier, Anna Marie -_ but it was Raven's own name that topped the list, followed by another very distressing entry for those who followed the news of the world - _Amahl Farouk_.

"Every piece of cloth has the strings that anchor it in place," Irene whispered, "the warp through which the weft travels. There are those on whose backs this new history will be woven."

* * *

 **Moira**

"Moira!"

The brown eyes behind the thick glasses were a welcome sight, and she took the hand offered to help her up the great stone staircase leading to the hospital's entrance.

"Daniel, it's so good to see you again!"

Moira Kinross smiled, trying her best not to wince. It had been a week now since she and Joseph MacTaggert had said their final goodbyes. The worst of the bruises had begun to fade, but unfortunately they weren't invisible. Joe had been so angry when she broke off their engagement that she thought he was going to kill her, and she thanked her lucky stars again that she hadn't gone through with the wedding. Dr. Daniel Shomron's telegram had arrived just in the proverbial nick of time.

"When I asked you to consult on Charles's case, I didn't mean for you to drag yourself all the way to Israel, especially with the shape you are in." Daniel pursed his lips into a thin line and halted their steps. "Moira, whatever happened?"

Her stubborn Scot's temper took over, and she squared her jaw and lowered her sunglasses. "Daniel, I appreciate your concern, but I'm jet-lagged and filthy, not a great combination. I'm here to see Charles. You said it was urgent."

He opened his mouth as if to say something more, but nodded and opened the door for her instead. She had hoped to be bathed in the deliciously recycled cool of central air, but it was just as sweltering inside as out. The perspiration gathered at the back of her white cotton blouse started to drip its way into the southern hemisphere.

Dr. Shomron caught the expression on her face. Offering her his handkerchief, he grinned.

"Have you ever been to Israel before, Dr. Kinross?"

She laughed and dabbed her face. "Cannae say that I have, Dr. Shomron. Is it always so blasted hot?"

He joined her laughter and gestured down a tiled hallway. "Only when it is not raining."

Another door led to a spacious office with a large desk set in front of an open window, curtains floating on a slight breeze. The desk was cluttered with slapdash piles of patient charts held down by fossil paper weights. Moira raised an eyebrow at her colleague in warning, but Daniel headed to the desk and retrieved one of the files, turning to face her.

"I know you are anxious to see Charles," he said carefully, "but I think you need to prepare yourself."

"I'm a physician, Daniel, not some bloody wetnurse. I deal with death every day."

"I realize that, but this is different. This is _Charles_." He held the chart out to her and frowned. "He was brought here from Cairo after having some sort of accident. His body sustained no physical injury, at least nothing that could cause his current condition according to his records."

Moira took the chart from him and flipped to the first page while her friend continued.

"There were no witnesses, at least none willing to come forward. He was found in an alley outside the city's Thieves' Quarter, what the hell he was doing there no one seems to know. The police, as ineffectual as they are, could find nothing. He was a John Doe, and eventually transferred here because of his prognosis - this hospital specializes in caring for the permanently brain injured. I was expecting some anonymous soul on my rounds, imagine my surprise when I recognized Charles." He pulled off his glasses and roughly wiped the lenses on his lab coat. "It's maddening. My staff hasn't been able to do anything for him. His body is perfectly healthy, but his mind is just…. _gone_."

Moira closed the file and held it to her chest, fighting the sting of tears. What she couldn't bring herself to say out loud was that all of this was her fault – she was the reason Charles had been in Cairo in the first place. How could she tell Daniel? They were all colleagues from their days at university, but Dr. Shomron was Charles's _friend_. Would he understand, or would he hate her for what she had done?

"Take me to him," she said through clenched teeth, " _Now_."

After the war, she was supposed to wait for Charles, her days spent playing the part of the dutiful fiancée pining for her distant soldier, but Moira had ruined it all when she fell for a dashing smile and a broad pair of shoulders named Joseph MacTaggert. Their future, all that she and Charles had planned together, Moira had destroyed their dream and broken Charles's heart in one hot rush of lust.

Instead of returning to his family's home in the states, Charles had disappeared, running away to the ends of the Earth. The dream, the school…it was all over now, and Moira would have to live with her part in that. But, someone needed to continue their research. There were names of mutant children whose condition Charles had suspected and wished to contact, children that desperately needed help. If any of that information fell into the wrong hands, it could be disastrous. It was up to Moira to protect the children and their families, she owed Charles that much. She followed Daniel down the hallway, her mind a whirlwind of emotions.

The room he ushered her into was oppressive, and not just because of the temperature. Guilt pressed on her like a physical force. Moira held her composure until Daniel excused himself under the pretense of checking on another patient, but once she was alone with Charles, she couldn't stop the tears that ran down her face to smatter the bedsheet covering his chest.

"Oh, Charles…Charles, I'm so very sorry."

She dropped to her knees alongside the hospital bed and sobbed until it felt that her heart would burst. It was her fault he had been hurt, her fault that he was lying here, machines pumping his heart, moving the air out of his lungs, her fault that…

"That seems like a tremendous waste of energy."

A deep voice of slightly accented English startled her, the face when she turned towards him a salty blur.

"Ex- _cuse_ me?" she hissed and bared her teeth to the stranger who entered the room and approached the medical chart that hung at the foot of Charles's bed.

"I spoke very plainly. There is no point exhausting yourself in this heat. He certainly cannot hear you."

Anger boiled away the grief when she rose to her feet. Tall, muscular yet trim, the man's face was youthful despite the gleaming head of white hair that framed it, and held the arrogance most medical doctors seemed to have in abundance.

"How _dare_ you!?" Moira cried and swung blindly.

He caught her hand mid-strike. Tattooed on the forearm that held hers fast were the faded numerals of a concentration camp survivor. She swallowed. Her wide eyes caught solemn ones of crystal blue, and his touch was gentler than she had lately come to expect.

"Do not mistake my suggestion for a lack of sympathy," the man said softly. "I am responsible for his care, and since Charles Xavier's arrival, I have seen no sign that he can hear me, or that he is aware of anything that surrounds him. Save your tears. I speak from experience that they sap strength better served elsewhere."

He released her hand and stepped from the room, and though she spent the rest of the day holding a silent vigil at Charles's bedside, she did not see the man again until later that evening.

Seated alone at a street café with only her thoughts and a copy of Charles's file, she did not register his presence until he set two steaming cups of coffee on the table in front of her. The heat and emotions of the day had taken their toll on her temper, but Moira still had enough fire in her belly to arch an eyebrow at his intrusion.

He gestured to the seat next to her. "A peace offering. May I join you?"

The sidewalks and streets around the café were alive at that time of night. Throngs of people hurried home from work, heading out for dinner, shopping, or a night on the town, and Moira allowed herself a moment to let her eyes drift over the hustle and bustle as he stood awaiting her response.

"That depends," she finally met his eyes and the corner of her mouth turned upwards. "Just how much whiskey did ye put in that cup?"

His answering laugh was deep, and she shuffled her papers into a pile to give him some elbow room across from her.

"I believe I owe you an apology." His voice was cautious footsteps, but there was a strength underlying the words. "I do not often interact with those who can speak, and I am afraid it has made me…"

"An arse?"

He swallowed the smile that tugged at his lips before he answered her. "I was going to say 'blunt'."

Moira leaned back in her chair. "Blunt I can handle. I don't take sugar in my coffee, and I would prefer not to have it candy coating the truth. I appreciate your honesty, Mr.…?"

"Magnus."

Turning her attention to the file again, she began flipping through the pages. "Well, Mr. Magnus, any other harsh, steaming truths you'd like to offer up? Daniel seems to think there's no hope for Charles."

She looked up from the sheath of papers to find him watching her intently between sips of coffee. He placed the delicate cup onto the saucer and tented his fingers in front of him.

"I am inclined to agree with Dr. Shomron's assessment of Charles Xavier's condition. There has been no brain wave activity since he arrived at our facility. We are keeping his body alive, but he is functionally brain dead. My recommendation is, and always has been, to cease the life support that is sustaining him."

Her heart lurched into her throat. "We cannae do that," she whispered, unable to keep the emotion from her voice.

"He is already dead, Dr. Kinross. We are merely delaying the inevitable. It is not right to keep him alive to ease your guilty conscience."

Cheeks pink from the heat flared a terrifying red. She stood and leaned over the table, one furious finger jabbing at his face. "Now listen here. Guilt is something I'll have to live with the rest of my life, but my conscience is my own damned business. Hear me when I say that Charles Xavier is not your average man. He's like nothing you've ever seen, with extraordinary abilities your puny brain can't even begin to fath…"

Her tirade was drowned by the sound of an explosion - a car bomb on the busy street nearby. Moira, Magnus, and their table were swallowed in a tidal wave of screams and heat.

Her first thought was that she was dead, she had to be, but did you still feel pain when you were dead? Smoke, the smell of burning diesel and charred flesh suffocated her, her skin sizzling with shrapnel raindrops. The deafening ring muffling her ears faded, replaced by a new, more terrifying sound.

"Fa-rouk! Fa-rouk! _Fa-rouk_!"

Voices, it sounded like an army's worth, grew steadily louder, their chorus joined by bursts of machine gun fire.

Fear seized Moira's stomach and gave it a sharp twist. The Middle East had never been the safest of places, but the region's instability had been increasing thanks to a group of radical terrorists pledging loyalty to a crime lord known as Amahl Farouk. Even in Scotland, Moira had caught wind of the rise in run of the mill crimes like fraud and robbery, along with an alarming increase in suicide bombings, kidnappings, and murders, spreading out from Egypt like a sadistic spider web, Amahl Farouk the fat arachnid sharpening his pincers in the center.

With everything that had happened to her since learning of Charles's injuries, it had honestly never crossed Moira's mind to pay a little more attention to the news before she charged headlong into the thick of it. Along with the poor people too close to the explosion, Moira was convinced she was about to become a statistic of a war she didn't fully understand.

The chanting grew closer. Forms began to take shape through the haze, bodies brandishing the menacing outline of semi-automatic weapons. They were sitting ducks. Moira struggled to free herself from the weight of the overturned table, but there was no place to go. Where was Magnus? Was he hurt? She wanted to scream for help, for somebody, anybody, but the spurts of gunfire and answering cries glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

The smoke began to clear, and suddenly there was Magnus, crouched over her with his hands extended. Moira felt a strange energy emanating from every pore of the man's body, being close to him like grabbing hold of a live wire. The wreckage around her shifted, and the legs of the table become fluid, almost liquid with the motions of his hands as he worked to free her.

Magnus rose to his feet, and Moira watched in horror when the terrorists turned their guns on him. She found her voice and screamed bloody murder, but to her shock the bullets stopped, frozen midair. Hovering centimeters from his chest, the shining metal tubes danced at his fingertips.

"Extraordinary abilities?" His eyes met hers, and they were the color of hardened steel. "Perhaps I understand better than you know, Dr. Kinross."


	2. Chapter 2

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

Author's notes - Thanks for the reviews everybody! Time has crawled forward just a little bit in this chapter, and we catch a glimpse of our favorite Southerners. Enjoy!

* * *

 **Remy**

"We not supposed to be down here!"

The boy's high pitched squeak sliced through the dark, and his companion froze on the steps below. "If they catch us-!"

Eyes ahead on the distant glow the pair had been following, Remy LeBeau swallowed hard and waited, expecting the glow to move back their direction. When it didn't, he spun and slapped a hand against his cousin's mouth.

"They not gonna catch us if you shut up!" he hissed.

Sharp teeth clamped down on the meat of Remy's hand, and he barely swallowed his own surprised yelp.

"Just cause you older," his cousin Etienne spat, "don' mean ya know everythin'! You can't be down here unless you one of de Guild – and you ain't ! You ain't even a real LeBeau!"

Remy wanted to sock him in the mouth and point out that Etienne wasn't a real LeBeau either - his last name was Marceaux - but instead let the younger boy go and watched the outline of his shadow scramble down the stone passage back the way they came. Remy sighed and inspected his palm in the dim light. It had hurt, but Etienne's bite hadn't managed to break the skin, probably because the boy was still missing his two front teeth. Etienne had gotten five whole dollars for those teeth – _apiece_ \- where Remy only got a quarter when he lost his. Tante Mattie said it was because the Tooth Fairy didn't reward rascals, but Remy knew it was because Jean-Luc was cheap.

Punching Etienne would have felt good, the big crybaby, but Remy knew it wouldn't stop what his cousin said from being true - Remy wasn't a real LeBeau. He may be older, eight to Etienne's six, but he had only been with the LeBeaus for a short time.

A year ago, was that all it had been? Things had changed so fast it was hard to believe, and sometimes it felt like a dream. Some nights he still woke up in a sweat, expecting to feel the cobblestones beneath his head instead of his feather pillow. Ever since he could remember, Remy had lived on the streets - filthy, starving, stealing tourist's blind just to survive – until the day he had picked the wrong pocket and his world had changed forever.

Jean-Luc LeBeau, head of the Thieves' Guild of New Orleans. Remy still couldn't believe his luck. When Jean-Luc caught him in the act, Remy had expected to be hauled to juvie or to get a whuppin' at the least, but the master thief had just laughed and taken him home to meet the family.

Family. It was still so strange to Remy. A life on the streets was all he had ever known, no mom or dad or last name, he had lived fast and rough in the alleys of the Quarter, nobody caring whether he lived or died. No warm bed with clean sheets, no one fussing over whether his hair was combed or his shirt was ironed. Remy never even had a birthday to call his own. But, he did now, thanks to Jean-Luc. His adopted father had let Remy pick, and Remy had chosen the day the two had met, the best day of his young life. They had to guess at how old Remy was, there was no records they could find of his birth, but the family had thrown him a big party with balloons and cake and ice cream.

Remy's stomach did a little summersault. Jean-Luc had done nothing but treat him right, and here he was, spying on him. He knew he should keep his nose out of his adopted father's business, but Remy was nervous. The family had been staying not in the plantation mansion where they normally escaped the heat of the New Orleans' summer, but in a brick Greek revival off Chartres St. Something was brewing, there had been Guild members in and out of their courtyard for weeks, whispers in the halls, closed door meetings. Jean-Luc had been absent for days, disappearing before dawn, coming home way after midnight. Nobody would give Remy a straight answer about what was going on, after all, he was just a kid, but if Jean-Luc was in trouble ... He couldn't let something happen to his father, not when he just found him. Etienne was just too little to understand.

But, what if Jean-Luc wasn't the one in trouble? What if they were going to send Remy away? A sick feeling slid over him at the possibility. He tried to behave, really he did – the last thing he wanted to feel was Tante Mattie's wooden spoon against his behind – but he didn't know sometimes what he was supposed to do. He never had a bedroom to keep picked up before or school lessons to learn, never spent so much time indoors or telling people what he was doing or where he was going.

If Jean-Luc was sending him away, Remy wanted to know so he could save his adopted father the trouble. Fagin would take him back in a heartbeat, along with a dozen other gangs in the Quarter.

He had snitched a big mug of Tante Mattie's chicory coffee so he could stay up all night, the plan to sneak out of his room and follow Jean-Luc's pre-dawn exit, but Etienne Marceaux had messed it all up. Staying in a room down the hall, Etienne had threatened to tattle if Remy didn't let him tag along.

Etienne was such a chicken. Remy should have ditched him when he realized where Jean-Luc was headed, but he hadn't wanted to risk losing sight of Jean-Luc. At first, Remy assumed he was going to have to pick the lock on the trunk of his father's fancy towne car in order to follow the head thief to wherever he was going in the city, but Jean-Luc hadn't even left the home they were staying in, heading instead to the basement and beyond, to a set of winding stone stairs that plunged into the murky black beneath the city. The only lights were lanterns attached to the damp cellar walls, and a flashlight Jean-Luc carried ahead. They had stayed at a safe distance, stalking Jean-Luc like a mark, barely keeping his glow in sight. The slippery stairs had finally emptied out into a set of stone tunnels, old and slimy and smelling like Bourbon Street.

Remy hoped Etienne wouldn't get lost on the way back, and almost turned around himself to make sure his cousin was all right, when he heard his father's voice echoing off the walls ahead.

"Surely, the translation is open to some interpretation."

Remy edged closer, but stopped at the sound of a woman's laugh.

"It has been debated for centuries, by scholars much more learned than you! We believe the boy to be the unifying force the old texts speak of – the one who will bring it all together. Are you expecting me to turn a blind eye?"

Creeping forward again, he reached the edge of an adjacent doorway and the soft light of hundreds of candles spilling into the tunnel. Inside, he spotted Jean-Luc in what looked to Remy like a throne room, complete with a platform and giant gilded chair with red velvet cushions. Remy's breath caught in his throat. On the throne sat the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. An angel, with wavy blond hair that reached to her waist and eyes so blue he could see them from the shadows. He sucked in his stomach and leaned against the stones lining the tunnel walls.

Jean-Luc spoke again. "I appreciate your concern for the boy, Candra. I merely think it is in his best interest to remain…"

Her laugh again, turning an angel's face into the bride of Satan. "His best interest, or yours, Jean-Luc? The boy is clearly a mutant. No matter his powers, he would be an asset to you and your clan."

Mutant. Remy had heard the word on the news programs Tante watched while she cooked supper, but wasn't sure what it meant. Was he a mutant? Was that why his eyes, red irises on black, were so strange and different than everybody else's? There was no way Remy was going with this woman, no matter how pretty she was, and he scooted backwards, ready to make a break for it, but paused to listen when Jean-Luc spoke up again.

"Remy is my son. No matter what your prophecies say, you will not take him away from his family!"

The summersaulting stomach warmed into Remy's chest. Nobody had ever stuck up for him before. He wanted to rush into the room and jump into his father's arms.

The woman smirked and crossed one long, leather clad leg over the other. "You're boring me, Jean-Luc. You know if I want him, I will take him and there will be nothing you can do to stop me." She sighed and tapped long fingernails against the glittering arm of her chair. "However, you and your family have been some of my most faithful servants, and I do despise children…" The tapping stopped and she trained those blue eyes on Jean-Luc. "Very well. For now, you can keep your whelp, but the time will come when he will not escape his fate."

* * *

 **Magnus**

It was early morning as he prepared to leave his New York City hotel room, the time just after lunch in Scotland. Even so, the exhaustion in Moira's voice reached through the telephone all the way across the Atlantic.

"How is everyone settling in?" Magnus asked carefully.

"Wonderful." The accompanying snort said it was anything but.

He ran his hand through his silver hair, still damp from the shower, and sighed. As newlyweds, he and Moira should still be in the honeymoon phase as they said, blissful and enjoying each other's company, but their bliss had been permanently disrupted by the sudden appearance of twins.

Wanda and Pietro, young children Magnus never knew existed, had literally been dropped on their doorstep.

His first wife, Magda, had left him shortly after the war and after the death of their first child. Magnus had been unable to save their daughter – Anya - from a fire, and had used his mutant power for the first time against those who had stopped him from rescuing her. Magda, her beautiful, fearful face seared forever into his memory, had called him a monster. She ran away and he never saw her again, but unbeknownst to Magnus, she had been pregnant with twins at the time.

He and Moira had recently learned of Magda's death, and of the existence of his pre-pubescent children. They had an instant, if unstable, family on their hands, mere weeks into their marriage.

Before the arrival of the twins, plans had already been in motion to carry on the work of Charles Xavier following their nuptials. Moira had acquired her former fiancee's research, and had taken control of her family's ancestral lands - the remote and desolate Muir Island off the coast of Scotland. Their intention was to open a school, a place for mutants to learn to use their gifts, and to offer their young charges sanctuary on the island, somewhere free from the scorn of ordinary humans. It seemed Magnus had inadvertently given the school its first students as the twins exhibited early signs of genetic mutation.

A father again after so many years, he could scarcely believe it. A second chance. Though he had missed so much of Wanda and Pietro's lives already, he swore he would do all that he could to make it up to them, if they would let him.

Magda's defection put them at about twelve. Adolescence was a difficult time for most teenagers, add to that a long lost father and his new bride, a new country, a new language, the possible eruption of unknown powers…things had not been going well.

Wanda seemed an agreeable enough girl, shy but very sweet, eager for her father's approval, but Pietro was another story. Insolent, withdrawn, he seemed to delight in provoking Magnus with his quick tongue. Suffice it to say, their transition so far had not been an easy one, nor had it been easy on Moira. Magnus knew she had dreams of children of their own, but that seemed impossible at the moment.

He hadn't wanted to leave his makeshift family so soon, but a matter of some urgency had arisen. After their wedding, continuing the work of Charles Xavier had become their number one priority. There was validity to the man's research, and Magnus felt they could make a true contribution to the world. Xavier had compiled a list of suspected young mutants he had hoped to train in the use of their abilities. It was a short list, and Magnus and Moira had started the work of contacting the families of these mutants before the abrupt appearance of the twins.

To their horror, several of the children on Xavier's list had disappeared. From different parts of America and of the world no human police force would have made any connection between them, but the series of tragedies that had befallen the young mutants Charles Xavier had hoped to contact could hardly be a coincidence. It seemed they were in a race against time and whomever was targeting the mutants, most barely into their teens.

He sighed tenderly into the receiver. "If there had been any other way…"

Her voice thawed. "I know. You and me, we're between a rock and a hard place on this one. I cannae leave Scotland, not with all the work goin' on here, and you could hardly take the twins to America with you. We barely have papers for them to travel Europe, let alone the states. Besides, we need to get to that lassie, as quickly and quietly as possible, not storming in like a bleedin' marching band."

There was a moment of silence, and he knew Moira well enough to read between the lines. If someone were deliberately attacking young mutants, Magnus was best equipped to deal with the situation, and she would just be a liability.

Moira cleared her throat. "Do you know where ye're goin' today?"

"It is my first trip to America, but I am sure I can manage."

"Oh, aye, I'm sure," she chuckled. "Just remember to stay on the right side of the road and you should do fine."

He laughed along with her, his heart lightened by their banter. If Moira was teasing, things were still good between the two of them. In the short time they had been together, he had learned that it was when the teasing stopped that he needed to worry. He had never met a woman with such a temper, such fire for life. She was passionate about a great many things, and his life had brightened considerably with her in it.

"Is there anything else I should know from the girl's file?" he asked, and sat on the edge of the bed, cradling the phone while he unrolled a pair of dark dress socks.

"Charles had been in touch with her family, a Professor John Grey and his wife Elaine, before his time at Edinburgh. The girl had some sort of breakdown, but her doctors were clueless. The parents were at their wit's end. In his notes, Charles had his suspicions about the reasons for the girl's withdrawal, thought maybe she had or would exhibit powers similar to his own, telepathy or something empathic in nature. The file says he planned to contact the family again when he returned to the states, but…" She stopped abruptly and he heard the sharp intake of breath, dreading the familiar path the conversation would veer down.

"Moira…"

"Nae, it's all right. Just one more, right? Between the car accident that killed the Worthington boy's parents, and the orphanage fire in Nebraska, this girl's just one more that he was supposed to save, isn't she?"

"Moira, you can't…"

There was a loud crash on the Scotland end of the line, and Magnus jumped to his feet. "Moira!"

"Oh, bloody hell," his bride muttered. " _Pietro!_ It's that son of yours, running through the halls again. He better hope I don't catch him, cause if I do, there'll be hell to pay!"

They said their goodbyes, and he found his thoughts drifting overseas to his mismatched family and their seemingly impossible task on his drive through the city.

He wished, not for the first time, that he had gotten a chance to meet this Charles Xavier. From the research, and from Moira's stories, Xavier seemed an intelligent and gracious man. They could have perhaps been great colleagues, even friends. The things they could have accomplished together seemed endless.

Instead, Xavier's body, still devoid of any brain activity, had been moved from Israel to Muir Island along with Moira and the children. For the time being, Magnus had given up arguing. If there were any hope of someday reviving the man, it lay with Moira, though Magnus wished she didn't have the daily reminder, the guilt that she punished herself with. They would make it right, if that was what she required. In his name, they would continue the work of Charles Xavier and help mutant kind take their first steps into a brave new world.

The house he pulled up to was in a quiet neighborhood not far from the highway, Annandale-on-Hudson, a bedroom town for commuters. Unfolding his long legs from the driver's seat, Magnus straightened his tie and retrieved his blazer from the passenger's before walking up the sidewalk to the front door. It opened before he rang the bell, and a petite blonde woman wearing bejeweled cat-eye glasses gave him a pinched smile through the screen door.

"Good afternoon. Mrs. Grey, I presume?" He knew his smile was hardly warm, but he hoped it was at least reassuring. "I spoke with your husband on the phone. My name is Mr. Magnus, I'm here from the Muir Island Institute?"

She stared at him blankly, but a man came up behind her, not quite as tall as Magnus but with a thick moustache and head full of slightly greying hair. "Mr. Magnus?"

The screen door swung open and John Grey gestured for him to come inside. The house was spotless in an unlived in sort of way. From the files, the Grey's had two preteen daughters, but there seemed to be no evidence of their existence behind the heavy oak door. His own children had come with a whirlwind of litter that followed them everywhere they went, but the Grey girls' stamp on the house was invisible. Everything seemed to be perfectly in place, no dust, home decorating magazines fanned out on the coffee table.

Mrs. Grey disappeared into the kitchen, and he could hear the clink of spoons against china as he and Professor Grey moved into the parlor and took seats facing one another. No soot in the fireplace, no television, books on the shelves arranged by color and size. Professor Grey certainly ran a tidy ship, Magnus mused. How had the good Professor treated a daughter that had become less than perfect?

"I wondered what had happened to that Xavier fellow," Professor Grey began. "He seemed very eager to help with Jean's…condition…and then we never heard from him again." The man's words were polite enough, but there was acid in the tone. "Left us in a bit of a bind."

"Yes," Magnus nodded solemnly, "Charles Xavier's accident was unfortunate, but we at the Muir Island Institute are committed to continuing his groundbreaking work. I would like to offer our assistance to you and your family."

John Grey grunted and sat back in his chair, his eyes leaving Magnus and straying to the neatly folded newspaper perched on the side table next to him. His fingers trailed slowly over the day's headline. "I don't know what you think you'll be able to do. The best therapists and doctors at the world's best hospitals haven't been able to do a damned thing for her. I don't see how you'll be any different."

His hand shifted, and Magnus was able to read the bolded type running across the paper, the conflict in the Middle East front and center as it had been for months. The region had always been a powder keg, but this time it was Amahl Farouk, the newly anointed Shadow King, ruler of Egypt, who was holding the match. Nation after nation had fallen to insurgents who pledged their loyalty to Farouk, their leaders assassinated, their cities laid to waste, and the United States and their allies seemed unwilling or unable to do anything to stop the upheaval. It was easy to turn a blind eye when the devastation was happening to someone else, something Magnus himself had witnessed in action.

"Ridiculous," Grey muttered, his attitude that of many of his fellow Americans. "Isn't there anything else going on in the world? If I have to see one more story on this Farrowck…"

"Fa _rouk_."

"Yes," John Grey snapped. "Of course. _Fah-rook_. My mistake." He shook his head in disgust. "With all the problems going on in this country, I hardly find the rise off some two-bit criminal half a world away newsworthy."

"At the time, people said the same of Adolf Hitler," Magnus countered.

Complacence. Denial. It was how people lived with themselves as their neighbors were taken away in the dead of night. If it was within his power, Magnus would never allow it to happen to his people again.

Dark eyes turned back to his. "I'm not saying he isn't scum. I simply find it hard to believe the man is responsible for everything the press blames him for. It's just fake news, drum-beating nonsense and drama cooked up to sell more papers."

Magnus dug his fingers into the arms of the chair, the tattoo emblazoned on his forearm itching beneath his jacket. "And I, Professor Grey, find it hard to believe someone with such nearsighted views is allowed to teach."

It was a foolish argument. John Grey and those like him would never understand until the cancer of hate and destruction spreading across the globe came to their very doorstep, and by then it would be too late. There was still time to save the girl, but if Magnus couldn't control his temper, the child's parents would never allow her to attend their school.

Magnus did not believe in coincidences. The children in Charles Xavier's files suffering a series of unfortunate accidents disturbed him. The Grey's daughter needed protection. Someone was hunting mutants, and he had a very short list of suspects. The reach of Amahl Farouk was extending further every day.

John Grey swiped the newspaper from the table, his cheeks flaring red. "You arrogant son of a bitch! Do you really think you know what's best for my daughter? You're just like the rest, and none of you have a goddamned clue! First this Xavier and his empty promises! No word for years while Jean suffered through therapist after therapist that could do absolutely nothing for her…Then you and this Dr. Essex show up on my doorstep, both of you acting so high and mighty…so sure you know what she needs…!" Grey stood and balled the paper at his side, and Magnus rose to face him.

He and Moira had researched every specialist in the New York City area, and Magnus had never heard of a Dr. Essex, nor had the Greys made any mention of another physician consulting on their daughter's case. Something about the name was familiar enough that it raised the hackles on the back of his neck.

"What I am offering," Magnus said slowly, "is the chance for your daughter to learn to control her gifts."

"Gifts?" John Grey spat the word. "Is that what you call what's happened to my little girl? A _gift_? Is it a gift that she can't go to school or go out in public? Or that Jean screams herself to sleep every night? My wife and I share her nightmares, watching that Richardson girl dead on the highway over and over, seeing Jean burned to ashes by a giant bird of fire! For god's sake, we had to send our daughter Sara to live with family to protect her!" He ran a shaking hand through his prematurely greying hair. "Tell me, Mr. Magnus, is it a gift to be scared of your own child?"

His throat suddenly dry, Magnus found he had no answers for John Grey. After all, the man was only human, how was he to comprehend powers that set those like Magnus and Jean Grey as far above him on the evolutionary scale as humans were above the primates?

Grey was trembling and turned his face away. "We're done here. You need to leave."

The visit was not going as planned, and Magnus cursed himself for losing control of his temper. Moira would never let him hear the end of it, but that was the least of his worries. He knew Jean Grey desperately needed their help. Her parents were clearly not equipped to handle her. If left unchecked, the girl would be a danger to herself and others. Perhaps, if Magnus apologized, all would not be lost.

"Professor Grey, surely we can…"

"GET OUT!" John Grey screamed, and whirled towards Magnus, fists raised. "Get out before I…" John Grey jerked mid swing as if seized by a fit. Magnus lunged forward and grabbed his shoulders, the man's head lolling to the side.

"Professor!" Magnus shook him roughly. "Professor Grey!"

Grey's eyes, oddly unfocused, found his, and the Professor's vacant smile sent shivers up Magnus's spine.

 _'That's better.'_

The voice, a young girl's, didn't come from John Grey's mouth. Rather than out loud, Magnus heard it ring in the depths of his own mind.

 _'Daddy gets a little out of hand sometimes. It's really not healthy.'_

Professor Grey continued to smile, and when Magnus released his hold on the man's shoulders, John bent to retrieve the fallen newspaper and sat back down in his recliner, snapping the paper open to the sports page. Magnus watched in speechless disbelief as Elaine Grey emerged from the kitchen with a serving tray, her eyes just as vacant, and the couple went about their domestic business as if he were not standing open mouthed in the middle of their living room.

 _'Won't you join me in the backyard_?' the singsong voice echoed again. _'They're much happier by themselves.'_

The shivers continued, every hair on his body standing on end as he made his way through the Grey's home, pristine enough to have been the subject of one of the magazines displayed on their coffee table. He slid open the glass door to step onto the patio, but his eyes widened at what lay beyond. The well-manicured lawn was any suburban child's dream, complete with a swingset and sandbox beneath a shady oak tree, but what greeted Magnus seemed more likely pulled from a surrealist nightmare. Every object not nailed to the ground – lawn chairs, a hose, flower pots and gardening utensils, toys and balls and roller skates – all floated freely through the air and swirled in a great cloud, circling the swingset where a pretty young girl with flaming red hair swung slowly back and forth.

The girl, it could only be Jean Grey, lifted her head and smiled brightly.

 _'Hello,'_ she said in his mind again, her lips unmoving.

Charles Xavier had been right, Magnus thought, the girl was a telepath and much more. That would certainly explain her withdrawal after the accident that had taken her friend's life. The strain must have been too much for her neophyte powers to process.

Jean drew her eyebrows together and finally spoke aloud. "You could just ask me about what happened to Annie instead of only thinking about it. It isn't polite to think behind someone's back."

He stepped forward, but for some reason did not raise his magnetic shield as he normally would. No one would nominate him for father of the year, but Magnus knew he was probably one of the only mutants Jean Grey had ever met. He needed her to trust him.

"Trust you?" her words halted his steps again, and she continued to frown at him. "Maybe. You certainly seem nicer than that Dr. Essex." Her eyes drifted away and the floating objects danced around her and over his head. "I tried to see inside him, but it was so dark. I made him go away, but thinking at him gave me a headache. Not like you, though..."

She blinked, and all the objects overhead crashed to the ground in a heap. Magnus jumped back, narrowly avoiding a clay pot full of marigolds that shattered against the patio stones. Jean skipped her way through the maze of broken lawn ornaments to stand in front of him, her eager green eyes wide.

"I've never been to Scotland before," she smiled wide. "Is it cold?"

Magnus started in surprise, but took a deep breath. The girl had obviously gotten what she wanted from his mind. He had never met a telepath before, but for some reason had always thought himself strong-willed enough that he would feel if someone were reading his thoughts, or that he would somehow be able to keep them at bay. Obviously that had not been the case. He hadn't felt a thing, and it was very unsettling. How could they ever protect themselves from someone as powerful as Amahl Farouk if the rumors concerning Farouk's mental powers were true? The Shadow King was a criminal despot, not a teenaged girl. Would the other students be comfortable around someone who couldn't or wouldn't keep their thoughts to themselves? Magnus would have to find some way to insure his mind and the minds of his students remained their own until they could teach Jean some level of control. He had no real reason to fear the girl or what she could do, and he wanted to keep it that way.

When he spoke, he kept the tone of his voice even, but stern. "If it is not polite to think behind someone's back, Jean, it is certainly bad form to read someone's mind without their permission."

Her face fell, but he placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "Come. There is much to discuss with your parents. Hopefully, your father will give me an opportunity to apologize, and we can tell them all about Scotland."

* * *

 **Raven**

"How tall are they? Can we really climb all the way to the top? Is there even _air_ up there?"

Raven wondered if there would be any air left in their vehicle before their trip was done, but pointed to the front steps of the house.

"Go inside, sweetheart, and make sure you didn't forget anything!"

The little girl pouted, but grudgingly mounted the stairs in the pre-dawn light, dragging her feet as she climbed.

"Raven will have plenty of time to answer all of your questions, Rogue," Irene smiled, "it's a long drive!"

The girl's face brightened, and Rogue raced the rest of the way into the house, slamming the door behind her.

"A _really_ long drive," Raven muttered under her breath, but Irene still heard her and chuckled softly.

"The child is excited," Irene chided, but the two women cringed at the sounds coming from the home's open window. Their lives had been recently upended by their fostering of Anna Marie, little Rogue, a terribly precocious six year old with a stubborn streak a mile wide, and one of the names on Irene's list. There had been others they had tried to find, but the timelines still shifted in and out of focus. For now, they had their hands full with Rogue, and Raven found she was actually happy.

"I blame you for this," Raven teased and leaned over to drop a kiss onto Irene's soft, wrinkled cheek. To their Mississippi neighborhood, she and Irene were a single mom and her elderly auntie raising a child together, Raven adopting the guise of a pale woman with long, dark hair and glasses.

"It will be good for you," Irene countered. " _Both_ of you. For heaven's sake, the child has never seen the snow before!"

"I wish you were coming with," Raven confessed. "That's all." Her fingers twined around Irene's frail and bent digits.

"Yes." If Irene's eyes were visible behind her dark glasses, Raven knew she would have been rolling them. "A blind woman on a ski trip. Thank you, but no. Besides, you two can use the time to get to know each other a little better." She squeezed Raven's hand. "The girl needs a mother."

Raven rested her forehead against Irene's. "Well, lucky for her, she has two."

Encyclopedia Raven wasn't sure how she survived the long drive with her sanity intact, but thirteen hours later, Rogue was finally quiet, asleep in a pile of blankets at their stop for the night.

Raven stepped from the motel's bathroom dressed in her pajamas, and wound her damp hair – back to its normal red, her skin its regular blue – up into a towel.

She smiled at the little body sprawled across the middle of the bed. Rogue had stated, loudly and repeatedly, that she was way too excited to sleep. But, after a bath and a room service meal of French fries and chicken fingers, the little girl had dropped like someone flicked her off-switch.

It would be late in Mississippi, but Raven didn't want to go to sleep without hearing Irene's voice. She sat on the edge of the bed and cradled the receiver between her chin and shoulder while she dug through her purse for a calling card. The television was on cartoons, and Raven scowled and flipped it to a news channel before she started dialing. The call didn't connect. She tried again to make sure she hadn't dialed the wrong number, getting nothing but a recorded voice telling her the call couldn't be completed.

"This is ridiculous," Raven muttered. Maybe the calling card was out of minutes. There was another in her purse somewhere, she was sure of it. In her search, her fingers brushed up against a folded sheet of paper.

"What the hell?" Raven hung up the phone and withdrew the sheet, unfolding it in her lap. She recognized the worn sheet as the list of names Irene had written that fateful night time had unraveled. As her eyes trailed over the names, some familiar, some not, Raven found a new note Irene had added to the bottom.

 _'My darling Raven'_ – it began:

 _'By the time you read this, Farouk will have come for us. If all has gone as planned, his people will find only me, as you and Rogue will be far, far away.'_

Raven's heart froze in her chest, but she forced herself to keep reading Irene's hurried scrawl.

 _'Do not come for me. Together, love will find a way, but until then, keep the girl safe. Farouk cannot get his hands on her. If he does, all will be lost._

 _My love, always,_

 _Irene'_

Raven's horrified eyes drifted from the letter to the harsh glare of the television. Onscreen a reporter was at the scene of a massive fire, and as Raven watched, the neighborhood engulfed in flames began to take on a familiar shape.

"Oh, no…" she moaned and turned up the volume.

 _"…witnesses say, the mutant insurgents were chanting the name of Amahl Farouk, the self-proclaimed ruler of Egypt. To recap, a series of terrorist attacks have rocked a tiny Mississippi town tonight, leaving an entire neighborhood engulfed in flames. First responders have been unable to get the fires under control at this late hour, but we do know that a dozen people have been confirmed dead, with many more unaccounted for. We will keep you up to date with any new developments. This is Manoli Wetherell for Channel Two news…"_

Her gaze fell back to the note and list of names. Irene had circled Anna Marie's name and another, Charles Xavier. The two names were connected with a line, next to which Irene had scrawled ' _Do not lose hope. Time will find a way'_.

"Hope?" Raven choked back a sob. "Is that all you've got?"

The names smudged beneath tears she didn't realize she was shedding.


	3. Chapter 3

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

Author's notes: Thanks for the reviews everybody! Glad you are liking it so far.

Ishanadahalf - as always, you are reading my mind. We won't spend a ton of time in the past, just enough to give a little background before the main story - a couple more chapters of history before the present day of this AU.

And Tx, sorry about the Irene tease.

* * *

 **Logan**

"Don't make me beg, Logan."

He grunted and took a long drag off his cigar, the heavy lines of his face shadows in the cherry's flame.

"Beggin' never was your strong suit, darlin'."

She turned her back to him and sighed across the empty tavern. The aging wood of the booth creaked when he stood, and he placed his rough hands on her shoulders.

"Is this kid worth it, Raven?"

The pair regarded the downy jacket curled into the fetal position on the seat of another booth. The girl - Logan guessed she couldn't be more than nine or ten - was sleeping, a tumble of white and chestnut curls peeking out through the jacket's fur-lined hood. He felt Raven stiffen beneath his touch.

"Irene thought she was."

Turning her around to face him, he forced Raven's yellow eyes up to meet his own baby blues.

"Then why me? Why ain't you sticking with her like Irene said?"

Raven looked back at the girl. "He has to pay for what he did to Irene."

"Darlin', she wouldn't want you to throw your life away..."

Slim fingers on his lips stopped him. "Don't you understand? Irene _was_ my life. Without her, there's nothing left."

Silence hung heavy between them until Raven freed herself from his grip and leaned over the child.

"I know you'll take good care of her for me." Raven smoothed the curls from the girl's forehead and she scowled in her sleep, the little button nose crinkled in annoyance.

Despite the tension in the room, Logan chuckled. Stubbing his cigar out in an overflowing ashtray, he leaned heavily against the wall nearest them.

"How can such a pipsqueak be so blasted important?"

"Irene wasn't sure. The timelines are all jumbled, knotted together. All she knew for certain was that Farouk would want the girl. Reason enough, I think, to keep her far, far away, don't you think?" Raven turned, but not before Logan caught the sheen of tears in her eyes. "And don't underestimate her. This pipsqueak will give you a run for your money. She's certainly earned her nickname."

"Rogue, huh?"

Raven shouldered a broken-in rucksack and cleared her throat. "Anna is her birth name. We couldn't find much on her family, but there was one other name that Irene connected, a Charles Xavier. I did as much research as I could, but there was no blood relation to Rogue, and the only Charles Xavier I could find with any association to mutants whatsoever was some student who earned his PhD in genetics at Edinburgh, but he disappeared after the war and hasn't been seen since. It's not much, but Irene thought there might be something there."

The air around Raven shimmered and her features melted, her blue-skinned body reforming into a bearded man with a flannel covered chest that stood a head higher than Logan. The new man nodded.

"Keep her safe, Logan. I know this is hard to believe, coming from me, but I've grown pretty fond of her these last few years."

A swirl of ice and wind was Raven's goodbye, and Logan crouched on the floor next to Rogue.

"You can quit fakin' now, punkin'. I know you been listenin'."

Sharp green eyes snapped open, and the scowl returned. The little girl known as Rogue sat up and crossed her arms atop her oversized jacket.

"So? Keepin' my ears open s'only way I ever find out what's goin' on!"

If her bottom lip stuck out any further, Logan thought, she'd trip on it.

That scowl deepened and her gaze shot to the thick oak door Raven had exited through moments before. "It's okay. I know she ain't comin' back. They never do."

"What do you mean?"

Sniffing, the girl raised her chin and tucked a wild, white curl back into her hood. "Momma, Daddy, Irene…Raven…" Those bright eyes, so much older than they should have been, bored into his. "Logan? Is that what she called you? Well, Mr. Logan, that's just how it works. Everybody leaves. Someday, you will, too."

Raven had been right. He was in a lot of trouble with this one. He ran a hand across his jaw. "I'm not gonna lie to you, Rogue. The world's a lousy place, gettin' lousier every day. Someday I may have to go. But if I do leave, it won't be because I want to, and come hell or high water, I'll find my way back again."

That bottom lip trembled. "Promise?"

"On my life." He held out a large hand with his little finger extended.

Rogue pulled off a fuzzy mitten and crooked her pinky with his, then collapsed against his chest, burrowing her head into the worn leather of his jacket. He patted her head.

"Everything's gonna be fine, Rogue."

* * *

 **Magnus**

"Sit up straight, lass, or those curls of yours'll be covered in porridge."

Magnus looked up from his stack of papers in time to catch the scowl their newest student directed at his wife when Moira headed back into the kitchen. He raised his eyebrow in warning, and the teen's face reddened, the color a bizarre compliment to the neon green tendrils cascading down her head to swirl dangerously close to her breakfast. Lorna Dane averted her eyes and poked the offensive oats with her spoon, but Magnus noticed the girl did correct her posture.

He rose to follow Moira, but paused at Lorna's elbow. "When you're finished, please get dressed. We will continue your training today in the Southwest fields."

She nodded but didn't look up, though he waited a few heartbeats before stepping away. Magnus kept the sigh to himself as he pushed open the heavy door to the kitchen. It had been weeks since her arrival, but he had been unable to break the ice between them.

Abandoned by her mother at a young age, Lorna had been raised by nuns in a Catholic school outside of San Francisco. When the emergence of her mutant power could no longer remain hidden from the outside world, the girl had taken it upon herself to contact the Muir Island Institute for assistance. They had arranged for her travel to Scotland to join their growing student body, but nothing could have prepared Magnus for what happened upon her arrival.

Routine tests performed upon Lorna's admission had revealed that the girl was in fact his daughter. Lorna had no knowledge of her family history, only a faded photograph left by the woman who had abandoned her on the steps of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, but Magnus couldn't deny that he recognized Lorna's mother, a woman he remembered only as Suzanna.

It had been after the war and after Magda. The times were freer, everyone in love with life again, and Magnus had been finding his place in this new world, so full of possibilities. A boy, a girl, a chance meeting at a train station, a recipe for love at first sight. He had spent a few weeks backpacking Europe with Suzanna, and then she had gone back to the states. Magnus had fully expected to never see her again, and certainly never expected yet another estranged child to show up on his doorstep.

He had thought perhaps Moira was joking when she shared the girl's test results with him - after all, Lorna's emerging magnetic powers so closely mirrored his own that it seemed an obvious jest - but the look on Moira's face had been deadly serious. He could deal with his wife's anger, but not her disappointment. She had called him reckless, irresponsible, but how could he explain to her what his life had been like back then?

Behind the kitchen's heavy door, Wanda and Pietro were busy cooking, a hobby the twins shared, and Moira had settled herself at the weathered oak table near the hearth.

"Good morning, father." Wanda smiled brightly while Pietro hacked his way through a basket of vegetables, his hand a blur across the thick chopping block.

Magnus was reminded of their first few years with the twins, and how he had thought they would never become a family, but the love in Wanda's smiled filled his heart with hope.

"Good morning Wanda, Pietro."

Pietro gave a bored grunt in his direction, then resumed decimating the vegetables piled before him. Speed was the boy's mutant gift, he had already broken the sound barrier in test runs around the island, but they had been struggling to teach him control, among other things. Where Wanda was a ray of sunshine and light, Pietro could be as welcome as a hemorrhoid depending on the day. Still, after missing so much of their lives, Magnus wouldn't have it any other way.

"Our training session will be on the moors today. We will head out after breakfast."

"Oh." Wanda's face fell.

Magnus surveyed the cozy kitchen. He wasn't a chef himself, but it was obvious from the bubbling pots and pans and collection of dirty mixing bowls decorating the counters that the girl had something in the works. "Wanda, what are you up to?"

Wanda untied her apron and shook her head, curls of auburn catching the early morning light. At times she so favored her mother. It had hurt Magus so deeply when Magda left, and as a result he found it difficult to deny Wanda anything.

"No, I…it is fine. Really. Our training is very important."

Upon closer inspection, Magnus recognized the ingredients for Paprikash, a favorite dish from the twins' homeland.

"Paprikash?"

Wanda ducked her head and nodded. "I thought it might be nice to share it with…with Lorna. I thought that it might make her feel more at home."

Magnus caught Moira's eyes and the faint twitch of a smile on his wife's face.

"I think that's a lovely idea, lass," Moira said, and made to stand. "Ye can miss one training session, it surely won't hurt anything."

"Indeed." Magnus was touched by the thoughtfulness of his daughter. "It will give me time to concentrate on developing Lorna's gifts."

Stepping towards his bride, Magnus helped Moira haul herself to her feet.

"Oh, no," Moira grimaced when they dislodged her from the chair. "Ye're taking that one with ye, too."

She jabbed a finger at Pietro, who was zipping back and forth across the old stone floor of the kitchen, the wind from his superspeed swirling the tendrils of steam coming from Wanda's stock pot.

"What did I do?" The boy screeched to a halt before dumping a bowl of vegetable muck into Wanda's concoction.

"Do you want a list?" Moira laughed at the sour expression on Pietro's face before he zoomed from the room, then turned her smile to Magnus. "Any more o' yuir bairns I should know about?" she teased, and he rested his hand on the warm swell of her growing belly.

"Well, there is one more…"

A loud crash and Lorna's yelp from the dining room signaled more mischief from Pietro. Magnus sighed and bent down to brush his wife's lips with his own.

A baby on the way. The timing could have been better, but the sight of Moira in the flower of impending motherhood filled him with pride.

"And take Jean wit' ye as well," Moira said softly, covering his hand with hers. "She could use the fresh air."

Magnus frowned. "Jean? Where..?"

"Where do ye think?"

He kissed Moira properly one last time. Waving goodbye to Wanda with promises they would be back in time for dinner, Magnus set off to find Jean Grey.

The grounds of the Institute were a hodgepodge of mismatched buildings arranged on the rocky cliffs of Muir Island. The centerpiece was an old brick manor that had served as residence to the laird, Moira's ancestor, two hundred years before them. It was terribly drafty, but it was home, and stood in almost defiant contrast to the steel and cement buildings flanking it that they had constructed to house the Institute's research and training facilities.

It was their goal to fill the Institute with young mutants and instruct them in the use of their powers, but so far only a handful of students had made the journey to the island. Besides his own children and Jean, there was a young girl from a nearby village - Rahne Sinclair - and a young boy from Boston - Robert Drake. There were others whose paperwork was in motion, but parents had become suspicious, distrustful, nervous with everything going wrong in the world.

Lone wolf attacks by mutants swearing allegiance to Amahl Farouk were on the rise. A train station in Paris, a nightclub in New York City, a pedestrian mall in Germany…too many people had died, and it seemed that the world's governments were unable or unwilling to do anything to staunch the chaos. The headlines were littered with the names and faces of innocent humans caught in the crossfire. To send one's children to the other side of the world was too much to bear for some parents, but young mutants were being radicalized and drafted daily by those loyal to the King, most against their will.

Magnus was convinced these children would be safer on Muir Island, and safer if they were trained to fight the madness that seemed to have gripped the world, but so far convincing their parents had been nearly impossible. Many families had gone underground to keep their sons and daughters safe, but Muir Island was a veritable fortress, the lower levels built to withstand a nuclear blast or hold back the powers of an out of control mutant. In his opinion, there was nowhere safer on the planet than behind their walls.

The lower levels were where they kept the empty body of Charles Xavier, and where Jean Grey could be found most days. Magnus had tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to convince Moira to remove Charles from life support, but Moira had found a stubborn ally in Jean. The girl spent most of her free time at the bedside of a man who would never again open his eyes.

 _'Do I have to go?'_

Jean's voice rang clearly in his mind, but she didn't look up from where she sat curled like a cat in the chair next to Xavier's hospital bed. She was reading a book, _The Once and Future King_. Overhead, a notebook floated, and colorful pens twirled under their own power, doodling the outlines of hearts and birds.

"I'd rather you did, yes," he replied. Jean spent much of her time in the lower levels. Too much, he thought.

 _'I like it down here,_ ' the voice snapped. _'He's a very good listener.'_

"Jean," Magnus reprimanded, "We have discussed this. People's thoughts are their own."

She jumped up and snatched the notebook out of the air, then flopped back onto the chair.

"That's why I like it down here," she grumbled. "It's quiet."

He knew it was difficult for Jean. Truly, as none of them were telepaths, there had been little help they could offer her beyond conventional therapy. They had been afraid at first that John Grey was correct in assuming there was nothing more that could be done for his daughter, but somehow Jean had emerged from her shell. Fragile to be sure, but finding her way through the tangle of her powers. Still, there had been setbacks. The concept of privacy had been one the girl was slow to adopt, but Magnus had made some progress on telepathic blocking technology that when completed would be of great use to them.

Charles Xavier had aged since Magnus first cared for him in Israel. The nurse Moira hired as an assistant and caretaker had let Charles grow a blonde beard, and the hair had tiny strands of silver threaded through it.

"Where is Amelia today?" Magnus asked and absently checked Charles's vitals.

"It's Saturday," Jean said aloud. "She went to the mainland." She snapped her mouth shut, and the frown on her face became a blank stare.

Magnus stepped around the end of Xavier's bed to touch the girl on the shoulder. "Jean?"

The nurse Moira had brought to the island was named Amelia Voght, the woman another victim of the war that had destroyed so many lives. Amelia was talented and bright, but for some reason she and Jean seemed to not care for one another. Nothing specific had happened as far as Magnus knew, but whenever Amelia was around, Jean seemed to retreat back into her shell.

The girl blinked rapidly and looked up at him. "Maybe you're right," she said, swiftly changing the subject. "Fresh air would be lovely."

Once upon a time, Scotland may have produced some of the world's finest steel, but, later that afternoon, Magnus watched his teenaged daughter struggle to pull a handful of ferrous material from the soil beneath their feet.

"Concentrate, Lorna. Feel for the magnetic particles. Your power is an extension of your being, like fingers reaching out to grasp the universe…"

"I'm trying," Lorna growled.

Beads of sweat had gathered on her forehead and upper lip despite the frigid winds howling through the waist high grass. A sudden roar joined the swish of the wind-whipped blades, and Magnus turned his head in time to catch the blur that was his son, racing circles around the island, carving a path in his wake. Nearby, Jean was humming softly to herself and picking Heather, a cloud of the small pink flowers following her through the air like a swarm of angry bees.

"Here," Magnus grasped Lorna's wrist and the girl started at the contact, an electric current forming between them. "Let me show you."

With his own mutant power, he used Lorna as a conduit and channeled the immense energies at his command through her outstretched hands. Together, they were more powerful than he had ever dreamed, their abilities not only an extension of each other, but of the Earth itself. He could feel the solar winds that buffeted their planet, feel the gravitational tethers that held the moon in its sway.

Magnus gritted his teeth and dug from the pit of his stomach to reach further, past the bonds of their world to flow into the reaches of the solar system. On some level, he was aware of Lorna screaming, but he wrapped an arm around her waist to steady her, his senses intoxicated by the energies of the galaxy that were his to command if he wished…

 _'NO!'_

Jean's telepathic scream slapped him hard across the face. Their connection broken, Magnus and Lorna fell backwards into the tall grass, his every nerve aching with the echoes of magnetic fire.

With an effort, Magnus raised himself onto his elbow and cast a bleary look around. Lorna had fainted next to him, a quick check revealed a steady pulse. Pietro was nowhere to be seen, but Jean was rushing towards him across the field, her mind projecting a jumble of images into his. He could see Wanda and Moira in the mansion's kitchen, Xavier forever asleep in his hospital bed, Pietro running along the cliffs, Bobby and Rahne checking the tide pools near the shore….Magnus shook his head in an attempt to clear the fog.

"Jean, whatever…?"

She was nearly to them and thrust another image like a knife blade into his skull. The nurse, Amelia Voght, materializing on the front steps of their home. Materializing? The woman was a mutant? Was this real? In his mind, Voght set her backpack on the front stoop and reached out to grasp the heavy door knocker. In reality, Jean reached his side and grasped his hand. Amelia was greeted by a surprised Wanda, and the nurse snatched the girl's hand and pressed the detonator she held hidden in her own sweaty palm…

The light of the explosion was followed quickly by its concussive tremor. Jean held her head between her hands and screamed. In the distance, an angry fireball swallowed the clouds.

Magnus shook Jean by the shoulders. "What is happening!?" he roared, but the girl was beyond words.

Wanda…the children…MOIRA! Magnus staggered to his feet and launched himself into the air, the hammering of his heart strobing his vision. He was to the Institute in a matter of moments, landing in the front yard, narrowly keeping himself from dropping to his knees.

Moira's ancestral home was a raging inferno. The explosion had obliterated the front half of the structure, the bricks and wreckage strewn in flaming piles at his feet. The blistering heat tore at his skin, but he pushed forward.

Wanda had opened the front door, but there was nothing left of the once grand and sturdy entrance but a burning shell. The billowing clouds of smoke singed his eyes and turned day to night, but with his powers Magnus tore through the rubble like a man possessed, frantic for any signs of life.

At the back of the ruined manor, he found Moira. The blast had thrown her body free from the fire, but the fall had broken her neck. With shaking hands, Magnus knelt and drew his wife and unborn child to his chest, willing the flames to claim him next. He howled like a tortured animal…his wife…his children…he clutched Moira as if he could force the very life back into her broken body.

"Father!"

He spun at the sound, but it was Lorna, not Wanda, who emerged from the smoke, leaning on Jean for support. Jean stumbled towards him and muffled silent sobs behind her hands.

Magnus seized Jean and shook her like a rag doll. "You saw?" he raged, tears running pale trails down the girl's cheeks through the soot darkening her skin. "You _knew_!?"

"I didn't know!" Jean wept. "I couldn't read her…couldn't see until it was happening! I'm so…sorry! Voght… her mind…it's like trying to hold smoke…!"

With one final shake, Magnus stood and turned away. He raked his hands through his hair and screamed to the heavens. Pietro, Bobby, and Rahne…had they been far enough away from the residence to escape harm? The newer buildings appeared to have sustained only cosmetic damage. The equipment housed within was surely intact, and Xavier...

 _Xavier_. The anger stabbed into Magnus, a red hot poker through his chest. Charles Xavier, a man who would never again see the light of day, _he_ would have survived. But Moira and their child...and Wanda…it was too much to bear.

His anger turned elsewhere. Voght. They had vetted Amelia so thoroughly, or so he had thought. How could she have done this to them?

"Father! Father, look!"

Lorna's shriek drew his attention. Magnus spun, his eyes following Lorna's frantic gesture to a swirling cloud of dust that coalesced into the bloody body of Amelia Voght. With an outstretched hand, Magnus caught the woman with his magnetic power before she fell, using the iron in her blood to lift her into the air.

"Why!?" Magnus roared.

The woman's heart rate was sluggish, blood flowing freely from her nose and mouth and a collection of mortal wounds. Amelia laughed, and Magnus squeezed the magnetic bonds tight enough to hear the crack of her bones.

"Who!?" he raged, but Voght's smile turned his stomach more than anything he had seen this terrible day.

"Answer's the same to both," she taunted with her last breath. "All hail…the Shadow King…"


	4. Chapter 4

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

Author's notes: Our last 'flashback' chapter before the main event. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

* * *

 **Logan**

He bent and traced the faint outline of the footprint, breathing deep the intruder's scent. Ahead were signs that more tracks had been brushed from the snow. The traces weren't fresh, and the cold made it hard to tell how long since anybody had passed by, but whoever was after them was good, real good, and deliberately covering their trail.

"What is it?"

Logan sighed, and looked up at his foster daughter. Her tiny frame was swallowed by the tattered flak jacket she wore, the white stripe in her hair hidden beneath a dark stocking cap. Rogue was still so young, but Logan had to keep reminding himself of all she had seen in her sixteen years on the planet. She wasn't yet a woman, but the green eyes that stared at him weren't a child's, either. He would give anything to protect her from the evil sickness burning through mutants the world over like a fever, but coddling her would only get her killed.

He gestured further along the snowy forest path. "Trackers," he grunted. "Second ones we've run into in a week."

Standing, he brushed the dead leaves and snow from the knees of his broken in blue jeans. He had known Farouk would come for them eventually. There wasn't a mutant breathing that hadn't had their lives upended by the King's network of slavers and spies, Logan had just hoped to keep one step ahead of them. So far they had been lucky, but if the tracks were any indication, their luck was running out.

The trackers were mutants' worst nightmares, super powered hunters roaming their territories and rounding up any undocumented mutants they found. Those taken alive were turned over to Farouk's slavers for a hefty bounty, and shipped off to Cairo for 'processing'.

Logan had thought they'd be safe in the Canadian Rockies, reports of the trackers had been few and far between in the Western hemisphere. So far, mutants had mostly been snatched from third world countries where the governments were wiped out. He and Rogue had been traveling too long, he hadn't realized Canada was fair game. If Farouk's snakes were slithering through the far north, odds were they had already made it stateside, and that meant the King had gained the upper hand in the U.S. He and Rogue were running out of places to hide.

They'd lived hard on the road since Rogue's powers had manifested, Logan working where he could to keep their bellies full. They'd stayed in some shitty places off the grid over the years - mutant communes, abandoned cabins - mostly keeping to themselves. It had been a tough life, but they had each other. Running into that first team of trackers had scared him. Since then, they'd been moving hard and fast, sleeping rough under the stars and leaving behind no trace. How could another team have found them so fast?

"You been doin' your meditation like I told ya to?" he snarled, and he saw her spine stiffen, a telltale sign he had touched a nerve.

"You know I have," Rogue snapped in response. "You watch me do it."

"I watch ya sit there, I hear ya breathin', but I can't tell if you're really doin' it."

She opened her mouth to argue, but he grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. "I'm tellin' ya this for your own good. You might think it's stupid, or a waste of time, but it's savin' our lives, darlin'. You control your thoughts? Farouk's people'll never find you."

The snap of a frozen twig was their only warning. Logan threw Rogue down into the snow and spun, his adamantium claws no defense against the shotgun blast that shredded his abdomen.

"LOGAN!" Rogue screamed.

The force of the gunshot threw him onto his back, but he rolled and staggered to his feet, his mutant healing factor already knitting new guts.

"RUN!" he roared, blood seeping hot down his pant legs to dye the white powder below. He heard her scramble to gain traction, but it was too late. Two bodies rushed from the trees, a third taking shots from a distance, the snow exploding at their feet in pulverized bursts. Two males, one heading for Logan, the other for Rogue, buffalo sized blocks of muscle whose scents were similar enough they jumbled together. They were related, Logan realized, the thought disappearing when one of them barreled into him like a Mack truck. The older one tackled Logan and pinned his arms, and the pair rolled together, the big guy getting an arm around Logan's throat. Fast, strong, Logan would have had a hard time holding his own even without the hole in his bowel draining all the blood from his body. The man twisted, trying to snap Logan's neck, and when that didn't work, the man squeezed.

Rogue was good in a fight - Logan had taught her himself - but unless she could get her bare hands on the younger one she didn't stand a chance against somebody so big.

The lack of air popped little flashbulbs in front of Logan's eyes. He couldn't wrestle free his claws, so he bucked his legs up and over, swinging his gaping wound towards the man's face. It startled his attacker enough that he relaxed his hold for a split second. Logan got one arm free, and a slice of his claws sent a decapitated head full of long, dark hair flying through the air. A hulking body dropped limp into the snow.

"NO! JOHN!"

Rogue's dancing partner - younger than her from the sounds of it but just as big as the other- screamed a blood curdling cry into the trees. With her assailant distracted, Rogue wriggled around in his arms and planted a kiss on his cheek. The boy dropped like a stone, and Rogue vaulted over his body, tearing through the snow towards Logan, the continuing shotgun blasts narrowly missing her.

"Logan!"

He caught her in his arms and swung her behind a tree. A blast exploded the bark at his shoulder. He sniffed at the frozen air, gunpowder and the hot smell of blood smothering death and decay. The shooter was a woman, more than a hundred yards away. From that distance she was lucky to have hit anything.

He saw the younger boy's unconscious body within spitting distance.

"Ya get anything from him?" he felt her flinch away from the closeness of his bare skin.

"Pain…grief…his brother…" her eyes were closed to the sound of continuing shots, but Logan puller her hard to his chest.

"His power, darlin'. Did ya get enough?"

She nodded sharply. "More'n enough to finish this," she growled.

Logan let her go. He came around one side of the tree to draw the fire, Rogue sprinted the other way, moving with the borrowed speed of their attackers, dodging the blasts that shifted their aim to her. No more shotgun blasts, a handgun now, then two, their assailant firing with both barrels.

The slowly sealing hole in his belly was slowing him down, but Logan stopped and took care of the boy before he followed after Rogue. He hated killing someone who couldn't fight back, but in Farouk's world it was the boy or them. Logan tried to tell himself he was doing the kid a favor, but it didn't stop the sick wave of guilt that washed over him at the staccato click of his claws into the boy's chest.

He saw when Rogue reached the sharpshooter. She dove for the woman but somehow missed, the shooter springing to the side at the last second to avoid Rogue's lightning fast tackle. Rogue twisted on the ground and lashed out with a fist, but the woman dodged every strike. Watching them move was like watching a choreographed fight staged for a movie. Rogue was doing everything right, every move the same Logan would have made, but somehow she wasn't landing anything.

When Logan reached them, he recognized the woman. "Neena!" he roared, the yell confusing the sharpshooter. Her pale face, a Dalmatian puppy birthmark decorating one eye, turned towards him. Over her shoulder, Logan saw Rogue's gloveless hand go for her throat, and he popped his claws and struck. The woman's eyes went wide when the adamantium thunk hit home. Retracting claws dropped the lifeless body between them.

He held a blood soaked hand out to Rogue. "We gotta go, darlin'."

"Yer hurt," she declared, her wrinkled nose reminding him of the little girl who used to make him tell her stories to stall bedtime. He was sure he was in for an argument, there was that stubborn set to her jaw, but Rogue bent over and rummaged through Neena's pockets before standing and heaving one of his arms over her shoulder.

"Their truck's not too far. Leavin' on foot'll do us no good if yer droppin' a trail of blood like breadcrumbs clear across the mountain pass."

"Yes, ma'am," he hissed through clenched teeth. Healing was usually as painful as the injury itself, and Logan knew he was in for a world of hurt this time. Ruptured bowels were never a good thing, he honestly wasn't sure how he had stayed conscious, it felt like he was losing blood as fast as his mutant power was replacing it.

They couldn't keep living like they had been. He needed to find somewhere Rogue would be safe, if there was anywhere like that left on the whole stinking planet. There were a few places that sprang to mind. Getting to any of them would be tough, and would mean calling in favors from people he preferred never to see again, but Rogue's safety took priority.

Making it to the tracker's vehicle would be slow going even with Rogue's borrowed powers, but they hadn't shuffled more than a few steps when she opened her mouth.

"Did you…did you kill Jimmy?"

He almost asked who she meant, but nodded. Jimmy was the boy whose strength flowed through her bones. He knew Rogue hated her mutant powers, hated to be haunted by the memories they left behind, but today those powers had saved her life.

* * *

 **Remy**

In six hours, Remy LeBeau would be saying 'I do'.

Walking through the wood-paneled halls of his adopted father's plantation estate, nestled deep in the bayous outside New Orleans, he passed household staff busy with preparations for the upcoming ceremony. They each offered their warm congratulations, but the smile Remy plastered on his face in return didn't reach all the way to his heart.

What was wrong with him? This was supposed to be the happiest day of his life, but the thought of putting on his suit and making that long walk down the aisle did nothing but fill him with dread, and it wasn't just cold feet. Even the thought of his betrothed in her wedding dress - or later on _out_ of that dress - couldn't bring a genuine smile to Remy's lips.

He had known Bella Donna Boudreaux since they were both snot nosed seven year olds, and their story should have been something out of a storybook. Childhood sweethearts, best friends, on paper their romance looked so perfect, but Remy couldn't help feeling like they were making the worst decision of their lives.

The two had grown up in the tangled criminal underworld of New Orleans - Remy raised in the Thieves' Guild, Belle the heir apparent to the Assassins' Guild - their families at war for generations. Recently, someone had decided the best way to ensure peace was to join the two clans in marriage.

Remy knew his adopted father - Jean-Luc LeBeau, patriarch of the Thieves' Guild - had a bigger hand in the decree than he was willing to admit, and Remy hated him for it. What a great idea, just like Romeo and fucking Juliet, and everyone knew how that story ended.

He understood the politics behind it. Their arranged marriage was supposed to strengthen the Guilds' alliance against the syndicates controlled by Amahl Farouk, the gangster supreme known as the Shadow King. Farouk, once a small time crook out of Cairo, had risen to unimaginable heights in Remy's lifetime, controlling most of the world's wealth, weapons, and territory. Candra - the benefactress of the Thieves' Guild - was one of the few left in power strong enough to hold out against Farouk's people and their incursions. With the Assassins' strength added to theirs, hope was they could push back for once.

But, it wasn't all political maneuvering, there was so much more to it. Remy sighed and raked a hand through his chin length hair. Candra and her stupid prophecy. A decade gone by and her words still hung heavy in his mind, casting doubt on his loving father's intentions. Jean-Luc never breathed a word about the conversation Remy had overhead as a child, and Remy had done his best to pretend it never happened, but there were days he found the ancient Guild prophecy impossible to ignore. The first had been the day his mutant powers emerged, verifying one of the benefactress's predictions. The second had been the day Remy and Belle were brought into the tunnels beneath New Orleans, the gathered leaders of their two families ordering them to become man and wife.

Resentment had since taken the place of love. Belle was smart, daring, and beautiful, everything you could want in a woman, but at eighteen, how was he supposed to know who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? Hell, he couldn't even legally drink in most of the fifty states, not that legality ever stopped him from doing anything. He understood the reasoning behind the forced union, but their families had taken away their choice. Jean-Luc was still stepping to Candra's orders, and Remy had never felt so used.

Jean-Luc had asked to see him before he dressed for the ceremony. Stopping in front of the door to his father's study, Remy took a deep breath and paused before knocking. Behind the heavy oak door came the sound of voices - his father's, raised in an unusual display of emotion, and another that was strangely familiar to Remy.

The door was flung wide and Remy stood chin to chin with a boy around his age. Though the pair were the same height, they couldn't see eye to eye as the boy - slim but muscular with closely cropped brown hair - wore red glasses tinted dark enough to obscure everything behind them.

"Step aside," the boy scowled and Remy stepped back and bowed gallantly.

"Pardon moi, mon ami," Remy called after him, and had another snarkier comment to make, but it died in the back of his throat when his gaze fell on the man who exited next.

Long black hair slicked back from an unnaturally pale face, a sharply trimmed goatee, and eyes that travelled over Remy as if he were something good to eat, the man paused when Remy rose to face him.

"No need to be so formal, young LeBeau," the man said, and his voice was the slither of a snake up Remy's spine. "Soon we will be the best of friends."

Before a confused Remy could ask what the man was talking about, Jean-Luc called from inside his study.

"Remy, leave Dr. Essex to his business and come in here."

"Until we meet again." Dr. Essex smiled that smile again and walked down the softly lit corridor, trailed from the room by another young man, blonde this time and much more solidly built than his companion, but that same stick up his ass walk.

"They ain't coming to the wedding, are they?" Remy quipped as he closed the study door behind him, but stopped short when he turned to his father.

At times, Jean-Luc could be a serious man, and seriously dangerous. The responsibility of running the family weighed on him, but Remy had never see his father's face so ashen and stepped quickly to his side, his anger momentarily forgotten.

"Pere, what is it? What's wrong?"

Jean-Luc, standing behind his desk, his wiry frame highlighted in front of the massive windows that overlooked the sprawling plantation, held up a hand to halt Remy. Over his father's shoulder, Remy could see the grounds busy with family members beginning to arrive for the day's festivities, and his nervous stomach clenched.

Avoiding his son's question, Jean-Luc's haunted eyes looked down at his desk and Remy followed his stare. Perched on the corner was a gift, the gold wrapping paper torn and the flaps of the box leaning open against one another.

"Don't ya usually open the presents after the ceremony?" Remy tried a joke again, but watched Jean-Luc swallow hard in an effort to control his emotions.

His father covered his mouth with a shaking hand and closed his eyes. "There will be no wedding," he finally said, his voice quiet but firm.

Remy blinked. "What? What do you mean? Did Belle say something? Look, if this is about the parlor maid or the cocktail waitress in the Quarter or those two tourists in the cemetery…"

Fierce brown eyes snapped up to meet Remy's bewildered red on black ones. "Shut up. For once, this isn't about you or your juvenile exploits. This is bigger than all of us." He shoved the package towards Remy, the box a heavy scrape across the desk's polished surface. "A present from M'sieu Farouk."

With trembling hands, Remy opened the flaps and gasped. It had been a few years since he had seen the now lifeless face that stared vacantly up at him from inside, nestled on a bed of wavy, blonde hair.

"Merde," he whispered, swallowing the taste of vomit that crawled up the back of his throat. _"Candra?"_

"Oui, my son. Our supposedly immortal benefactress." From a drawer, Jean-Luc retrieved a flask and took a long pull. "We are well and truly fucked."

Her eyes, cold and crystal blue, seemed to stare at him from beyond the grave. Candra, powerful, beautiful, ruthless, had been the only thing standing between Remy's family and criminal slavery at Farouk's feet. Fear was sliding over Remy's skin, but also a wildly inappropriate sense of relief. Unless they wanted to start a war, which Remy and Jean-Luc knew neither side could win, both New Orleans' Guilds would have to swear fealty to the Shadow King or to each other, their feud ended by default. Remy was off the marital hook.

"So, the wedding is really cancelled?"

Jean-Luc flopped into the leather wingback chair and rubbed his eyes. "You don't have to be happy about it, Remy. The Benefactress protected us all, but you especially, in ways you've never understood, far beyond helpin' you learn to control your mutant power."

Remy took the flask his father offered. "You talkin' about the Elixir of Life? You know I never drank that Kool-Aid."

"You never needed to."

Laughing, Remy raised the flask in salute. "I don' know about that, Pere. Who don't want to live forever?"

Their eyes met and both flicked to the tattered gold paper.

Jean-Luc cleared his throat. "A longer life wasn't the only thing the elixir offered our people. It offered certain…protections…against Farouk."

Farouk, his rise to power the stuff of legends, had accomplished in the last two decades what some could not achieve in several lifetimes. Rumor was, mutant powers had aided his criminal coup d'état. There were more than a few who thought Farouk, a mind-reader, one of the most powerful ever born, was twisting humanity's worst qualities with his telepathic powers. Using his mental abilities, Farouk had recruited a veritable army of like-minded individuals to his service, turning or destroying any who didn't fall in line. The criminal and superpowered worlds had been sharply divided, but any who had opposed the Shadow King had eventually succumbed to his will, Candra the latest domino to fall.

Leaning over the desk, Remy caught his father's eyes. "What are you talkin' about? Why wouldn't I need protection?"

Smiling sadly, Jean-Luc covered his son's hand with his. "Something Candra knew and I suspected. Your mutant powers give you a natural resistance to Farouk's talents. Candra's people used your DNA to bring that immunity to the Elixir. We kept it all hidden, and kept you away from anything that could bring you into contact with the King. You know what he does to those he can't control. I'm sorry, son, but with the benefactress gone, I don't know how long I can protect you."


	5. Chapter 5

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

Author's notes: Hi, everybody! I'm trying to be a little more regular with my story updates (dang, I used to be so good about new chapters every Wednesday!) but my new schedule is a little screwy and makes it a bit tough. No worries, though, my stories are always finished (except for a little spit and polish) before I start posting them - I won't leave you hanging!

This chapter is all Remy as far as the narration goes, and we have moved into the 'present' of the story - no more flashbacks. I kind of struggled with how much time to spend in the 'past' on this one because I liked a lot of the stuff I came up with (Magnus and Moira should be a thing, I think - somebody make it happen), but ultimately I wanted Remy and Rogue to meet, so here you go.

Thanks for reading as always, and seriously Ishandahalf, stop reading my mind...haha

* * *

 **Remy**

"Well, don't you look positively _delicious_?"

The blonde - wrapped in a skintight silver dress that left very little to even Remy's vivid imagination - stopped his steps across the crowded casino floor with one fine boned hand in the middle of his chest. His heart skipped a beat at her touch, but not for the reason one would expect. The woman who licked her lips and swirled a finger around the top button of his dress shirt was Andrea von Strucker, one of Amahl Farouk's nastiest servants, and his guts clenched.

What the hell was Andrea doing in _Madripoor_? The island nation was Viper's territory. The last thing Remy needed tonight was for someone to raise a red flag on his wheeling and dealings, and his mind raced to find a way to slip free from Andrea's grasp without raising her suspicion. Was her presence just a coincidence, or had someone been keeping tabs on him? Of all the nights for a chance encounter! This job had been months of careful planning, he had called in every favor he had to get his hands on the schematics for Viper's penthouse, but it looked like the pinch might be over before it even began.

Viper, a woman with considerable power in her own right, had built an empire out of nothing but her own grit and determination. Everyone knew Farouk's people weren't welcome here, it was part of the reason Remy had even considered it as a target. For his own protection, he usually kept a lower profile, but there were too many clamoring for what was rumored to be in Viper's private safe.

The crowd milling around them would normally provide adequate cover for a quick exit, problem was, Remy knew Andrea wasn't alone. The woman never did anything without her twin brother, Andreas, the pair were two twisted peas in a pod. Where she went, her twin followed, and Remy didn't know if he could slip away from them without causing a scene or drawing undue attention to himself.

He swore under his breath. He _needed_ what was hidden in Viper's personal safe. The Elixir of Life was his last shot at getting back into the Thieves' good graces. The Elixir hadn't been seen since Candra's murder, and there would be many who would welcome even a traitor like him with open arms at the mere promise of a taste. He couldn't throw in the towel, not just yet, and gave Andrea his best sultry smirk. If he could charm his way out of this, all may not be lost.

Andrea tugged the sunglasses Remy was wearing down the bridge of his nose, revealing his red on black eyes, a very unique characteristic he often found difficult to disguise.

A sadistic smile exposed bleached white teeth behind thickly painted red lips. "I knew it was you, LeBeau. I never forget a…" the hand on his chest rambled down his shirt front to rest on his belt buckle. "… _face_."

Behind her, a man that was her taller, broader doppelganger appeared at her shoulder and scowled. "Sister," the man snapped. "Control yourself. This is hardly the time to collect strays." His scrutiny turned to Remy, and one blonde eyebrow arched in surprise. "My, my. I stand corrected. You never cease to amaze me, Andrea. I should know by now not to underestimate your penchant for finding the diamond in the rough."

Andreas placed his hands on his sister's slim shoulders, and his long pale fingers toyed with the silver spaghetti straps of her dress. "LeBeau. It has been a long time. Perhaps later," the man's smile, minus the lipstick, was identical to his sister's, "you'll join us?"

Remy took a small step back to shake Andrea's hold on the waistband of his slacks, and raised the glass half full of whiskey he had been dragging around the casino purely as a prop. "Merci, but non. I've already had plenty to drink tonight."

Andrea giggled and covered her mouth with her hand while Andreas rested his chin on his sister's shoulder. Remy squirmed uncomfortably when the man slid one of the straps down her pale skin.

"Joining us for a drink wasn't exactly what we had in mind."

Andreas's smile was crooked and Remy tried his best to play it cool as the blonde Bobsey twins undressed him with matching icy eyes.

A petite Vietnamese girl, her dark hair cut into the shining bob of a silent film star, rescued Remy from the awkward silence that followed.

"If you are ready," she addressed the von Struckers in clipped tones. "My mistress will see you now."

Remy said a silent prayer of thanks, and he swore the girl, barely in her teens by the look of her, had heard him. She cast a sideways glance at Remy, and he felt the familiar tingle of a thwarted telepathic probe at the edges of his subconscious. Telepaths were illegal in Farouk's world, the penalty for harboring one was death or worse. Viper played things a little too close to the edge, even for Remy's taste.

The twins followed the girl, and Andrea pouted as she waved goodbye, but her brother sneered.

"Until next time, _thief_." The hiss of Andreas's last word carried the hint of warning.

Deserving the huge swig he slugged back from the whiskey in his hand, Remy wove through the throngs of people buzzing around the flashing neon lights of the slot machines. His eyes stayed glued across the room to the two platinum blonde heads being escorted through a heavily guarded door that he knew led to the business wing of the skyscraper.

When the pair disappeared along with the girl and a huge beast of a bodyguard, Remy reached beneath the cuff of his tuxedo jacket to check his wristwatch. _'My mistress will see you'_ , the girl had said. The von Struckers were meeting with Viper. If he was going to still salvage the heist, it was now or never. In a place like the Princess Bar, it was too easy to get distracted if he wasn't careful, and right now his thoughts were doing a fine job pulling him off track.

Were the twins - too bored, rich, and twisted for their own good - acting as emissaries for the Shadow King? If the pair had requested a private meeting with Viper on Farouk's behalf, such an alliance didn't bode well for the rest of the world, but it certainly helped with Remy's activities for the evening.

The Princess Bar, once a ramshackle dive on the wrong side of the bay, now served as the island nation's premier entertainment destination. A hundred story high-rise, The Princess was Viper's home and base of operations. Over the years, the stronghold had become one of the last holdouts to Amahl Farouk and his organization. But, if Remy had learned anything, it was that the Shadow King was always looking for weakness in those who opposed him, a way to turn any advantage to his favor. Meeting with Farouk's people was surely a risk, but the risk was Viper's, not his, and he couldn't let such a break go unexploited. With the Princess Bar's best security otherwise engaged, Remy had a clean shot at Viper's private vault and the Elixir of Life that supposedly resided there.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, his fingers finding their way to the now familiar scar that ran along his scalp. Running a job out of Madripoor wasn't the worst thing he had done in the last few years, but trying to steal something right from under Viper's nose may be the stupidest. He should just scrap it, give up. That would be the smart play. Remy certainly didn't need the Elixir, never had, but he needed protection and a place to lay low for a while, and the Elixir was the currency that would buy his safety.

He had been spotted by Farouk's people and by one of Viper's own, a difficult job now bordering on impossible, but the blondes had provided a newfound diversion he couldn't pass up.

Pausing for another sip, Remy's eyes circled the massive room, taking note of the exits and marking the locations of security cameras, dealers, and guards, mostly mutants mixed among the thousands of well-dressed thrill seekers, comparing them to the blueprints he had memorized.

A band played onstage, and the blonde Barbie doll fronting it was familiar to Remy. What was her name? Belle had always liked her, and had played her album nonstop. Sparkler? Firecracker? He stepped closer. Dazzler! That was it - Alison Blaire. Not really his style, but she had a nice sound, and her honeyed voice drizzled pleasantly in his ear. The closer he stepped, the more Remy could see that the years had been hard on the songstress, there were scars that even the best makeup couldn't hide. It was really a shame. The Dazzler had been pretty hot shit back in the day, until she had lost her mutant powers in a very public fall from grace.

Madripoor was an escape from the world and from the reach of the Shadow King for many, as evidenced by the staff, didn't look like there was a human on the payroll. It would be a shame if Viper let that all slip away by joining forces with the King.

The song ended the set, and Dazzler blew a kiss just for Remy before a bodyguard with a strange pin head perched on top a grotesquely disproportioned body shuffled her offstage.

He turned back to the crowd, but someone shoved into him from behind, hard enough that he spilled the rest of his drink down the front of his expensive suit.

"Hey!" Remy turned to give whoever it was a piece of his mind, but the man - a quivering pile of sideburns and muscle that stood barely over five feet - glared murderously at him before shouldering him out of the way and continuing through the crowd.

"Mon dieu," Remy muttered and tried to shake off the icy whiskey. At least it had been expensive whiskey. He hated to smell cheap.

A gloved hand patted at his shirtfront with a cocktail napkin.

"Sorry 'bout that."

The hand was attached to a slender arm, and the woman's smile reached all the way to a pair of emerald eyes. Remy found himself grinning back despite his irritation.

"Nothin' personal, sugar, he's just pissed our appointment got bumped."

"Merci, chere." Remy took a good look while the woman dabbed at his lapels. Porcelain skin covered by a sinfully tight but modestly cut black dress, younger than he thought at first glance, but trying to look older with expertly done makeup. Her hair was auburn, with a curious white stripe winding its way through the front, and the thick locks were twisted into an elegant updo.

"Can I buy you another drink?" her voice held the hint of a Southern accent, and the sound tugged at the homesickness he thought he had buried long ago.

There was nothing Remy would have liked better - it was certainly the best offer he had all night - but even without looking at his watch he knew his time was winding down. If he was going to do it, it was time to shit or get off the proverbial pot. He needed to get out of the casino and upstairs into Viper's private quarters and vault before his distractions came looking for him again.

Taking her small hand in his, he brought it to his lips. "Unfortunately, I've got an appointment myself. Could I trouble you for a raincheck?"

Her cheeks flushed, but she smiled again and raised one eyebrow. "If yer lucky."

He tugged her closer. "You don't know this petite, seeing as how we just met, but Lucky be my middle name."

"You don't say?" She looked up at him from under those long lashes. "And what's your first name?"

"Remy." He held her hand between them and rested it flat on his damp chest, his heartrate accelerating beneath her touch, this time for all the right reasons.

"Pleased to meet you, Remy. I'm…"

 _"Rogue!"_ Sideburns had turned back and bellowed at her from across the floor. "Quit yer jawin' and move it!"

She grimaced. "Sorry. Duty calls."

His hand found its way to her narrow waist and the expensive silk covering it. "Then, 'til we meet again, cherie." He leaned forward and moved his lips towards her cheek, but she stiffened and stepped back, those green eyes wide.

Straightening her dress, she backed away from him in apology. "We'll always have Madripoor, right?"

Before he could stop her, she had vanished into the surging crowd. He almost gave chase, but maybe it was for the best. He had work to do, but Remy felt like something had changed. In the few minutes he had been preoccupied, the raucous atmosphere of the casino had shifted, and he could sense a strange tension emanating from the staff. Remy watched as the guard at the northwest entrance touched his ear and spoke to someone on the other end of his communicator. The conversation was short and heated, and when it ended, the guard stormed through the door, and he wasn't the only one - three more left their posts at various points in the room, leaving the nearest doorway to the interior of the skyscraper unattended.

Here we go, he thought. Avoiding the cameras, Remy walked through that door like he owned it, and slipped into an adjacent stairwell where he quickly stripped off his suit to reveal his working clothes beneath, a black bodysuit decorated with deep purple accents. The costume was a lightweight body armor - deceptively skintight but impact resistant, it'd stop a shotgun blast at point blank range. The belt he retrieved from his tuxedo pants contained rappelling wire and a small grappling hook, one could never be too prepared. Patting down the costume's hidden pockets, he felt for his trusty lock picks and mentally tallied the decks of playing cards he had on hand.

Gambit was the name he went by on a job. Candra had been right, his mutant powers - the ability to charge inanimate objects with explosive kinetic energy – had hit just before puberty. Playing cards were his weapon of choice. They were portable, easy to throw, and took a hell of a charge.

Usually Remy wore a trenchcoat when he was pulling a heist - more pockets meant more cards, and if he had to go out in public the jacket covered his costume - but there had been no way to smuggle one in under his tuxedo. It had been hard enough to find a pair of utility boots that looked dressy beneath slacks. Truthfully he felt a little naked without his jacket, but pushed the feeling aside and went to work.

He had hoped the von Strucker twins would provide a decent distraction, and if Viper's guards and the increasing shouts and sounds of gunfire echoing down the stairs were any indication, they had done that and more. Remy had his window of opportunity as long as he could steer clear of the chaos. Running through the building's schematics in his head as he went, he silently made his way to the top floor penthouse and Viper's personal quarters. Bypassing the security door was a joke, and he found the suite of rooms strangely deserted.

The hairs on the back of Remy's neck stood on end. Something wasn't right. Where were the guards? Had the twins kicked up so much fuss that Viper needed all hands on deck? He had certainly expected more of a challenge, but wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

In the near darkness, Remy spied the life-sized portrait of Viper on the back wall of her bedroom. The woman's image, rendered in oil paints, sneered at him as he stepped forwards. Reaching for the frame, he swung it free from the wall, but frowned at what lay beneath. Cracking this safe would be child's play, he had broken into worse by the time he was six years old. Was Viper that overconfident that no one could get to her inside her own building?

His guts were tying themselves at knots, and Remy had learned the hard way it was best to listen. He had a bad feeling about this. What was he missing? Was the safe booby-trapped?

Lord knows it wouldn't be his first close call with Farouk and his people since the little rebellion that had cost Jean-Luc his life, but something about Andrea and Andreas being in Madripoor didn't smell right. He wished he had trusted his first instincts on the casino floor and hightailed it, but since he had already come this far…

Nimble fingers cracked the combination in a manner of seconds, though those moments felt like an eternity as Remy expected poison darts to shoot from the safe or any other number of booby traps he could imagine. When it opened, his heart stopped at the sight that greeted him. Inside, two glass vials lay on their sides, uncorked and completely empty. What was left of the Elixir of Life dribbled onto the velvet lining the bottom of the safe.

Remy nearly threw up. Empty. _Gone_. Someone had beaten him here, all of this had been for nothing!

Remy closed the safe and the painting's door, swallowing the sour taste in his mouth. What the hell was he going to do? There was no way the Thieves would welcome him back now. If Essex caught him again, he was dead meat.

Backing away slowly, Remy nearly tripped on the body that lay immobile on the floor next to the bed. The beam of his flashlight froze on the lifeless form of Viper, the sneer on her bloodied face a mirror image to her painting.

"Fuck," Remy muttered and bent down to check for her pulse.

The Mistress of Madripoor was as dead as a doornail, but still warm. He had just missed being a witness to her murder or maybe another victim. A massive hole had been blown in her chest, and singed playing cards fanned out around her on the blood soaked carpet.

"Fuck _me_ ," he hissed.

Any crook worth the name knew Gambit's signature when they saw it, though Remy knew the blast that killed her could have just as easily been caused by the mutant powers of the Eurotrash wonder-twins, Andrea and Andreas von Strucker. Had he played right into their damned hands - Remy LeBeau, assassination scapegoat? Had they known he was coming, followed him and planned to use him from the start, or had they merely seized the opportunity? Either possibility was as disturbing as it was plausible. Farouk sent his dogs in to wipe out Viper, but would they have been smart enough to drink the Elixir themselves? Viper sure hadn't been.

Before he could rise from his knees, the door burst in, followed by a dozen guards, maybe more. Gambit threw himself behind a sofa to dodge an eruption of machine gun fire, but lucky for him they were suits for hire, not Viper's right hand ninjas. The room exploded around him in a hail of bullets and broken glass, the guards barking orders to sound the alarms.

Yep, Remy thought bitterly, _Pawn_. Farouk's people had probably seeded the rumors of what lay in that safe to catch any leftover thieves in their net. If Viper's people killed the thieves in retaliation, there would be nobody left alive that would shed any tears, but if Remy was captured instead, the Shadow King would get his slimy hands on a prize he had chased for years.

You'd think a man what called himself Gambit would have seen that checkmate coming, Remy thought bitterly. Shoving the nagging voice away, he sent a brace of charged cards towards the entrance. While the guards screamed and scattered, Remy sprinted for the sliding doors that led to the balcony. Another card took care of the glass and he leapt after it, throwing himself into the air to dodge another spray of bullets. Midair, he twisted and muttered a silent prayer, unleashing another volley back in the direction he had come from. Viper's quarters burst into flames.

He fell, but not far. The grappling hook of his costume hit home and caught the railing of another balcony a few stories down. It hurt like hell when the line jerked him to a stop and smashed him against the outside wall of the building, but a few bruises were better than splatting into the bay below. Hand over hand, he yanked himself up onto the balcony and leaned against the concrete to catch his breath. The smell of smoke reached his nostrils and fiery debris began to rain down from the sky. He needed to get out of there, but he was still too high for his wire to reach to the ground level, and the sounds of alarms inside meant escaping through the interior of the building had just become a terrible idea.

Steeling himself, he rappelled down several more times. He was pulling himself up and crawling onto another balcony when the glass doors to the inside exploded. Remy threw himself to the floor just in time to avoid the solid human missile that sailed over his head before arching out over the water.

Too late, he recognized it as the man from earlier, the hairy guy who had spilled his drink, and gravity called the man's heavy body into the water below.

 _"LOGAN!"_

The girl with the white stripe screamed over the wailing alarms, and Remy turned in time to see Andreas von Strucker punch her in the stomach. Struggling to free himself from the grappling wire, an enraged Remy aimed a card for the man, hitting him square in the chest and sending him flying backwards.

"How are you still alive, thief?" Andrea shrieked. Blood poured down the woman's face from what appeared to be a well-deserved broken nose. Her twin was down and out and wasn't getting up anytime soon. The von Strucker's mutant powers only worked when they joined hands, which Remy always thought was pretty stupid, but what wasn't stupid was the gun a furious Andrea levelled at his head.

"Don't you know?" A brutal kick from behind dropped Andrea to her knees, and the shot she fired hit the ceiling instead of Remy. "Lucky's his middle name!" Rogue, her hair and dress a mess, punched the blonde in the face, knocking her on her ass. More guards poured through the interior doors in a cloud of thick black smoke and bullets.

"Idiots!" Andrea's scream was barely intelligible as she held her cracked and bloody jaw with her hand. "Farouk wants the girl alive!"

Dodging a hailstorm of bullets, Rogue barreled towards Remy at full speed, catching him around the waist and shoving them both off the balcony.

"You crazy…!" He screamed in her ear and they flew out over the water, but his voice was drowned by a deafening explosion that claimed the top floors of the building he had lit on fire after finding Viper. The pair dropped until Remy ran out of line, but he felt her small fingers find the catch on his belt and release it, and they fell the rest of the way to the ground instead of the water, crashing to the parking lot below with a sickening crunch. Remy felt the hot wet warmth of blood even through his insulated costume.

 _Oh, fuck._ Shit, shit, shit. Oh, _Fuck!_ He had tried to shield her body with his to let his armor absorb the worst of their impact, but at the last second she had twisted and took the brunt of both their bodies slamming into the concrete.

"Merde…" Ignoring the jarring pain of pretty much every inch of his body, Remy rolled off the girl, the sight that greeted him bringing a tightness to his chest and the sting of tears to his eyes. Bones were sticking out of her every which way and her pretty face was covered in blood. Brushing back a wayward white curl, he caressed her cheek. "Why did you go and do that, cherie? You didn't have to…" Though he knew it was hopeless, he forced himself to feel for her pulse, but when he touched her skin with his gloved hand, her eyes snapped open and she shoved him back.

"Just…give me a minute…" she snarled, hunched on all fours like a wounded animal. A horrified Remy watched her body knit itself back together, the bones popping back into place one by one.

Around them, debris rained from the sky, and a flaming piece of metal landed close enough to snap Remy back to reality. They had fallen out the bayside of the building, and were lying in the middle of the loading dock along the edge of the water. Throngs of panicky people poured out of the casino. The lights from the fire and the army of incoming emergency vehicles were growing brighter and would soon erase their cover. They were vulnerable, they needed to get the hell out of there before anyone found them.

Everything back where it was supposed to be, the girl tried to stand. "Logan," she mumbled. "I have to find Logan."

She was having such a lousy night, he hated to point out that Sideburns was probably fish food by now, but to Remy, finding this Logan seemed to be the least of her problems. Farouk wanted her, Andrea von Strucker had said. Even thinking what that could mean chilled Remy to the bone.

Before he could open his mouth, there was another explosion, powerful enough to shake the ground around them, and Remy moved to shield her from any more debris. Instead of the expected wave of fire and brimstone, there was a rush of cold air and the sound of thunder. When the clouds opened in a monsoon rain to douse the flames, Remy's insides did a backflip. Glancing skyward, he found the explosion under the control of another, someone he had hoped to never see again, the woman's mane of white hair visible against the night sky.

No, he thought, not _her_ , not now! If Storm got ahold of them, they were as good as dead.

"Didn't you hear them?" he whispered desperately and grabbed Rogue's arm. "We gotta get out of here!"

Remy was on the verge of panicking as a memory – old, but still raw and angry - rolled over him. New Orleans, the steps of the cathedral. The cobblestones had run red the night of the Guild's last stand. He could still see his father on his knees with his hands tied behind his back. Sometimes when he closed his eyes, Remy could still feel the spray of his father's blood against his skin…the cost he paid for his own survival too high, the debt still unpaid…

Baring her teeth, Rogue ripped her arm from his grasp and raised her fists. Six bone claws, each a foot long, ripped through the backs of her hands in a horrifying squelch of flesh. "You don't understand!" she roared. "He's all I have! I have to find him!"

"But it's _you_ the King wants!" Remy challenged.

She winced and he saw her swallow, fear touching her features for the briefest of moments. He could relate. Mon dieu, he thought, _we gotta get out of here_ he had said. We - as in him and her - together. Though he had been thinking it, he couldn't believe he had said it out loud. They may have just met, but this girl was in trouble. The Shadow King wanted her. What could be so important about her? He couldn't just abandon her to Storm's tender mercies.

She retracted the bone claws and Remy watched the wounds they left behind heal and disappear, the heavy rain washing the blood and grime from her skin. They were out of time to look for her partner, and despite her tough façade, he couldn't just leave her on her own. Madripoor wasn't safe for her, and thanks to the von Struckers, it wasn't safe for him either. The wail of emergency vehicles nearly on top of them, Remy made his choice.

"C'mon, let's go." He tugged at her arm again, his voice equal parts plea and invitation. They needed to find somewhere safe to lay low until he could figure out what the hell was going on, but his bowels clenched.

If the King was truly hunting them, there was nowhere on Earth left for them to hide.


	6. Chapter 6

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

Author's notes: Thanks for the reviews, everybody! I've been having a real inspiration problem lately, and your feedback always keeps me going - I really appreciate it! I'm going to try a new thing for me and answer any questions here that popped up in the reviews from the previous chapters - I used to try and PM everybody that I could, but I hope this will help others who maybe have some of the same questions. So, here goes...

Ishandahalf - The bulk of our story is set about five years after Remy and Belle's aborted nuptials. Remy got into a lot of trouble in those five years, and the Essex/Remy connection (along with what happened to Jean-Luc) will be pieced together as we go - I never know if you want me to spoil things for you! Logan definitely went to Madripoor and Viper for help protecting Rogue, maybe not his best idea.

LEGNA - "Everyone is dead" - Yeah, I racked up a really high body count with this story. I must have been in a mood when I wrote it, I guess. Sorry if I am wiping out everybody's favorites! :(

Couplest - Magneto and company are still out there. The Shadow King's influence is far and wide, but has it quite reached all corners of the globe?

Thanks again to my other reviewers and readers - cnf, Linaewen'Z, slightlyxjaded, txpeppa and anybody else I'm forgetting - your comments always make my day!

* * *

 **Raven**

They were herded like animals into a parking lot - blocks away from the burning casino. Some had tried to run for it, escaping the explosion only to find themselves stumbling into a trap, as literal demonstration of 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' as Raven had ever seen. She had thought about running, too, - using her shape-shifting power to blend into the background of panicky humans mixed up with Madripoor's mutant population - but she decided instead to see how it all played out. Besides, there really was no place to go. Farouk's people, she recognized some of the nastiest in the business, had the place surrounded, and were only too gleeful to mete out their form of sadistic justice.

Raven was nothing if not resourceful. Her cover identity had served her well these last few years, and had gotten her into places she never could have dreamed. She was loathe to let all that crumble now, not when she was so close to her goal.

"Simmer down, songbird, it'll all be over soon."

Wrenching her arms behind her back was John Greycrow, the mutant assassin known as Scalphunter. They had crossed paths too many times to count in her long life, but instead of flipping him over her shoulder and beating the living crap out of him, Raven played the part of the damsel in distress.

"Please don't hurt me!"

The voice coming out of her throat wasn't hers, but had opened a great many doors. People still liked to be entertained, and Alison Blaire, the Dazzler, had been one of the best in the business, at least until the woman had put one too many needles into her arm. Death had been a kindness, and the Dazzler's face and voice were one of the best disguises Raven had ever forged for herself. Raven's mutant ability didn't let her duplicate the powers of others, but she had nailed Alison Blaire from her retinal scans to her soprano. Explaining away the Dazzler's light projection powers had been easy enough, a couple of well-placed rumors that heroin had fried the woman's system seemed to have done the trick. Most people only cared about the voice anyway - it was the singer's pipes that had gotten Raven her regular gig in the Princess Bar, and a shot at Viper's vault.

Raven gave a half-hearted attempt to get out of Scalphunter's grip and shed some tears for good measure. It had been barely an hour since she had drank the Elixir of Life. She'd know soon enough if the information concerning its properties had been worth what she paid for it. All those careful months of planning, of positioning, it had almost been for nothing! Luckily, Raven had spotted that damned thief just before her set break. Who knows what would have happened if she hadn't gotten to Viper's vault first? Raven still hadn't pieced together the puzzle of the night. According to her source, Gambit had to have been after the Elixir, but it looked to her like he had been set up for Viper's murder instead. Raven had stepped over the woman's body to get to the safe in her bedroom while Gambit was still in the casino, and the Elixir had still been inside.

The taste of it, thick like wine but with the tinge of something darker, burned the pit of Raven's stomach. Would it be enough to shield her from Farouk's pet telepaths, or from the man himself? The Elixir was the only way Raven had found that could get her close enough to the Shadow King to exact her revenge.

Thunder rolled high over her head, and panicked screams erupted from the crowd. A woman - dark-skinned, her hair a streamer of white - dropped from the smoke-filled sky to land softly on the pavement. Scalphunter pushed Raven onto her knees in front of him, and other mutants were forced to do the same. Some of the screams became sobs, but there were a couple of stupid mutants who fought back, their bravery met with the sickening crunch of flesh on bone.

Madripoor had been a refuge in a world gone wrong, a place to hide, but they would all pay the price. Mutants were under the rule of the Shadow King. His world, his law. Those who disobeyed were tortured, brainwashed, murdered, the list of atrocities done in Farouk's name were endless, and judging from the whimpering around her, Viper's employees had heard all the stories.

"Enough!" With a flick of Storm's wrist, a massive bolt of lightning struck the center of the parking lot. There was a reason Ororo Munroe had been at Farouk's side since she was a little girl.

"Your mistress has perished," Storm boomed. "Madripoor has fallen."

As if on cue, the casino caved in on itself, the hundred story building collapsing under its own weight. More screams as billowing clouds of smoke and debris filled the sky and streets. The shaking of the ground would have knocked Raven on her ass if she hadn't already been on her knees. Storm was controlling the worst of the heat and smoke with her mutant powers, but a new sound emerged over the rumble, the steady thrum of helicopters.

Raven's heart echoed their beat. Had she made a mistake? Could she still make a break for it before Storm's people started slitting throats? The warning squeeze of Scalphunter's grip made Raven doubt herself, but Storm kept talking.

"For too long has Madripoor stood separate from the rest of the world. It is time her citizens used their gifts in service of their mutant brothers and sisters, in service of your King! You will be taken to Cairo for evaluation. If deemed useful, you will be placed where there is the greatest need of your talent."

Despite the dark puddle of blood spreading over the asphalt in warning, there was a struggle down the line, and the shaking voice of Xi'an Coy Manth - Viper's illegal Vietnamese telepath - shouted through the hand clutching her throat.

"Useful?! What gives you the right to judge-!?"

Raven wished the young girl would shut up. Xi'an had always kept her secret, and Raven screamed with her thoughts in warning, but it was already too late. She could feel the bloodlust of Storm's enforcers like a physical force, and Xi'an was holding a match to the gasoline. Raven caught the slight nod of Storm's head before the sickening crack of the young mutant's neck. It happened so fast, the thud of her lifeless body to the ground the last sound Xi'an ever made.

More screams while Raven plotted six different ways to slip out of Scalphunter's grasp, three of which left him with his hands attached. There was no way she could go to the pits of Cairo and remain undetected, not with the humiliating evaluation mutants were put through. Invasive scans, power inhibitors, she would never make it out alive. But, Cairo would put her one step closer to the Shadow King, and one step closer to avenging Irene.

All around her the mutants of Madripoor, now prisoners, were being hauled towards the waiting helicopters. Scalphunter grabbed Raven by the hair and forced her to her feet. It was now or never if she was going to escape. If she could get free of his hands, and head for the water…she shifted her weight into a ready position.

"Boss!" The roar of Scalphunter's voice stopped Raven in her tracks, and Storm stepped briskly towards them.

"Yes?"

So much carnage and chaos around them, yet Ororo Munroe stood with her nose in the air like she saw none of it. Immune to the suffering of others, obedient lap dog to a tyrant, Raven added Storm's name to her hit list. If not today, then someday, she would make Ororo Munroe pay, make them all pay, for Irene, for every baby left without their mother.

"I think we got one for the palace."

Scalphunter tilted Raven's face - Dazzler's face - towards Storm, and the brief flicker of recognition played at the weather witch's features.

"Extraordinary." Storm nodded and waved her hand towards one of the helicopters. "As always, John, you have a keen eye. A rare talent, and a rare treat for the King. Take her on your transport, and see if Emma will evaluate her personally."

Raven held her breath. Directly to the King? All of this time, so many years planning her revenge, could she really get lucky enough to bypass the pits?

"Storm!"

A group of thugs were staggering through the crowd, dragging the manacled body of a drowned man between them. Six big, bad mutant beefcakes, yet they were barely able to carry their waterlogged prisoner.

Raven's heart stopped beating. She knew that wild mop of hair anywhere - their prisoner was Logan! But, if he was here, where was Rogue? He was supposed to keep her away from all of this, to keep her safe! She struggled for real this time, frantically scanning the crowd, but it had been years since she had seen the girl. Little Anna would be all grown up now, Raven could have walked right by her and not recognized her face. She had to find her, couldn't let Farouk get his hands on her..!

"Time to go, sweetheart."

The butt of Scalphunter's gun cracked against the back of her skull. The world around her blurred at the edges, but she held onto consciousness by her fingernails, even as he threw her over his shoulder and carried her towards the chopper.

* * *

 **Remy**

"Let me take a wild guess…nothin'?"

Her voice was a scathing stage whisper that set his teeth on edge. Over his shoulder, Remy could see Rogue standing with her arms crossed over her chest, the pout on her face visible even in the dim overhead lighting. He wanted to scream at her to keep her voice down - fat lot of good that would do - but he swallowed his anger. He had already learned there was no arguing with her when she was right, and he took full responsibility for their current predicament.

They had spent three days playing stowaway in the hold of a Japanese freighter, hardly his idea of a first date.

Scrounging the shipping containers for food or blankets had been a bust so far, the vessel seemed to be hauling nothing but car parts and cheap electronics. Thankfully, the cargo hold wasn't under constant surveillance. No video cameras, no motion detectors, but the crew performed regular security checks that had been easy enough to avoid so far. It seemed the ship wasn't transporting anything high priority, and the crew seemed to care little about the contents of the mountain of crates stacked in the middle of the hold. When they did come downstairs, the crew member that drew the short straw would make a quick stroll through with a flashlight, then continued on to the considerably warmer engine room at the front of the ship.

At least they had found water - a hose hookup in a deserted corner of the cargo bay - and a place to go to the bathroom. What a way to get to know each other, Remy thought, keeping a lookout while the other person used a bucket they dumped down a floor drain. Real romantic.

He dropped from the top of the shipping crate empty-handed, landing silently on the cold steel floor in his stocking feet. One more down, he thought grimly, but instead of continuing on to the next, he snatched his boots back from Rogue, unable to meet those green eyes. It had been his brilliant idea to escape Madripoor as stowaways on a cargo ship, but it hadn't been one of his more inspired plans. He had trapped them like rats in a cage.

"What," Rogue hissed when he stuffed his icy feet back into his boots, "yer givin' up? There's still a couple dozen crates down here! One of 'em might have some warmer clothes, or somethin' to eat!"

He pinched the bridge of his nose as he stood. The girl's stomach was tied to her charms. The emptier her belly had become, the feistier she had gotten. He had been trying to keep the peace, but it was getting harder and harder to keep his own temper in check the longer they went without a decent meal. What he wouldn't give for a big bowl of Tante Mattie's gumbo, thick and spicy, or a shrimp Po' Boy from Felix's, dressed just right…

Remy exhaled and pushed the thought of warm French bread, that perfect mix of soft but crusty, out of his mind. "We wastin' our time," he whispered, lowering his volume and leaning in, hoping she'd get the hint and keep her own voice down. Instead, she flinched back from him as she had done every time he moved closer to her. "All the crates have the exact same packing list taped to the side. Not a damn thing we can use right now. We need to search the rest of the hold if we gonna…"

There was the sharp wrench of the door at the top of the metal staircase leading to the ship's upper levels. The echoing sound sent a shudder through the both of them. Company, someone was heading their way again, ahead of the regular schedule they had been keeping the last few days. Rogue's eyes widened, and Remy grabbed her arm and yanked her into the shadows.

The freighter's hold was a twisting maze of platforms and pipes, the darkness created by the shipping crates making for the ultimate game of hide and seek. He didn't want to think about what would happen if they were caught. It really had been stupid to climb on board without knowing whose ship it was or where it was going, but they had been desperate. At least here they had a chance, even if they might only be delaying the inevitable.

They ran and tiptoed in the same steps, Rogue barefoot, Remy wishing he had stayed that way, the clatter down the metal staircase growing. He strained his ears while keeping his eyes forward. Two, no three of the crew this time, conversing loudly in Japanese.

Dammit, why did it have to be Japanese? Remy had a passable Mandarin, could even pull some Thai out of his ass, but his Japanese was pathetic. What were they after this time?

In front of him, Rogue stumbled and fell forward, smacking the steel deck with her flattened palms. Without thinking, Remy dove on top of her, wrapping her in his arms and rolling them both sideways into the shadows. She stiffened in his embrace and tried wiggling away, but he snaked his arms and legs around her, holding a gloved hand over her mouth in warning. He knew enough Japanese to understand the crew had heard them and were coming their way.

Rogue's heart hammered in time with his own, the heat of her body making him the warmest he had been in days. He backed them away from the voices until they ran out of room, the curve of her backside pressed tightly against him. After days on the run, that skin tight black dress was starting to look the worse for wear, the slit running up the side now showing the barest hint of the panties crossing over her hip. Remy groaned into her hair, and he heard her breath hitch when he moved his hand from her mouth to rest on her rib cage.

Merde, what the hell was wrong with him? The voices were close, too close, and all he could think of was running his hand up that slit…

The beam of a flashlight swung their way, and the pair ducked as one, sliding under and through a tangle of pipes as the light played on the wall and a row of lockers behind them. The beam swung back and forth, the tone of the voices teasing. Remy could see the men from their position, two of the crew snickering at a third, the man with the flashlight bewildered, his expression translatable even if Remy couldn't do his words justice. The man had heard something, he was spooked, but their search had found nothing, and his friends were giving him hell for it.

Remy and Rogue were silent and still tangled together while the crew spent a few hurried minutes searching the rest of the cargo bay. It felt like he held his breath until the voices clattered back up the rickety staircase, but when they heard the slamming of the door to the hold Remy sighed and relaxed against Rogue.

"Dat was close," he murmured into her hair and rested his chin on her shoulder.

She stiffened, their closeness of a few minutes ago forgotten, and that invisible gate she kept around her banged shut again. "Too close." She freed herself from the circle of his arms and caught his eyes over her shoulder. "How many times do I have t'tell you? You can't touch my skin! It's dangerous, I could have hurt you!"

Though he had only known her a few days, it was a conversation that was already wearing thin. Rogue's mutant power was initiated by skin to skin contact, a cruel joke she couldn't control that forced her to isolate herself from all human contact, but Remy wasn't scared. A girl like her? She was worth any risk, but so far she had shut down any attempt on his part to get close enough to prove it. Still, he gave her some space and stood. It was an argument for another time, especially after their close call.

His eyes swept around, exploring a new corner of the massive cargo bay, when his gaze fell on the row of lockers looming behind them. He grinned at Rogue and waggled his eyebrows. "What you think, petite? Worth a look inside?"

She rolled her eyes but smiled, and in less time than it took to tell Remy had opened the combination locks, rewarded with a feast fit for a king in the crew's lockers. Snuggled into a new hidey hole for the night, they proceeded to gorge themselves on packs of cheese crackers and gummi candies. It wasn't crawfish etouffee, but Remy hadn't tasted anything so delicious in a long time.

Rogue, crammed in next to him but somehow still keeping her distance, had removed her gloves to open a packet of dried seaweed. Her elbow was bloodied from her skid across the floor, and Remy frowned at the wound.

"You not healing?" he whispered, and she scowled at him.

"No, course not. Why would you think… _oh_." her eyes darted away.

He had struck a nerve and reached out for her, which was the absolute wrong thing to do.

"Don't," she flinched. "Please." She took a deep breath. "The fast healing, that…that wasn't mine. It was Logan's."

His heart sank. If the subject of her skin was a broken record, their failure to rescue Logan was the elephant in the room. Rogue hadn't exactly blamed him for leaving Logan behind, but Remy felt it in her stare sometimes, in the words she didn't say.

"Chere, I'm sorry," Remy muttered, "I didn't…"

She was shaking, fat tears rolling down her cheeks to drip onto the discarded cellophane wrappers. "I took part of it from him, borrowed it with my powers, and those bastards…" she couldn't finish the thought, it was too much, and Remy finally pulled her into his embrace.

"It's okay," he murmured. "That Logan as tough as he looks? There's no way he didn't survive that fall."

"I should have looked for him," she growled. "He never would have left me behind!"

"And let Storm take you straight to the Shadow King? Is that what Logan would have wanted?"

She didn't say another word, just shook in his arms while Remy fought back tears of his own. What a fucking mess he had gotten them into.

Her breathing steadied after a few minutes, and Remy looked down to find she had fallen asleep.

Maybe it wasn't all bad, he thought. If he was being honest with himself, this was the most fun he'd had in years.

Smiling softly, Remy reached up and smoothed her hair back from her forehead with his gloved hand. He had never met anyone like Rogue. Where he came from, you played your cards close to the vest. Secrets were a bankable commodity. You never knew who you could trust, everyone you met was shrouded in deceit and lies, but this woman? She was an open book. For better or worse, every thought that crossed her mind showed right up on her face.

She wasn't much older than he was, not quite twenty, and had been adopted as a child, same as him. A southern girl, raised in Mississippi before her world had fallen apart along with everyone else's. Since then, she had been on the run with the hairy missile the von Strucker's had shot across the harbor, the man she only knew as Logan, the pair of them wasting their lives hiding from the King while searching for some stranger named Xavier, though neither one of them seemed to really knew why, their search based on the ramblings of some old blind woman.

He hadn't been able to share as much of himself, only telling her the highlights of the ballad of Remy LeBeau. Surprisingly, he wanted to give her more, but there was just too much that had happened since his ill-fated wedding day, things that he was too ashamed of to put into words, things that hurt too much. He ran a hand through his hair and traced the familiar scar hidden beneath, shivering.

What the hell was he going to do with this girl? They had needed an exit from Madripoor, and had found the Japanese freighter open and inviting in the bay, but then what? Jump ship at some random port? How would they get out undetected, and where would they go if they did? Remy had a little cash squirreled away in his pockets and his ID, but he doubted she had anything hidden under that tight dress. He couldn't just shake her hand and wish her the best. It had been a long time since Remy had felt close to someone, but in just a few days' time it seemed he had known Rogue his whole life, and that scared him. He couldn't just abandon her.

Still fast asleep, she sighed and nuzzled into his shoulder. Why the hell had the von Struckers attacked her? What did Farouk want with her? Despite her warm body against his, Remy's skin was goosebumps.

Rogue had said she and her pops had been in hiding for years, but had come to Madripoor to ask Viper, an old frenemy of Logan's, for asylum. Her mutant powers were definitely unique, he couldn't argue with that, they were the reason she had survived their tumble to the cement. Remy had never heard of a mutant who could borrow the powers and memories of another person. According to her, there seemed to be no limit on the number of abilities she could absorb at one time, the length of the transfer dependent on the length of contact. If she held on long enough, would the transfer become permanent? That would certainly be a useful thing to the Shadow King, he could have a bodyguard with the firepower of an army all in one pretty package.

Those damn powers of hers. What a thing she lived with, not bein' able to touch another person skin to skin without knocking them unconscious or worse. That folks, Remy thought, is what you call irony. First girl he wanted to get close to for the better part of a decade and she was so scared of what she could do that she held him at arm's length, unless she was fast asleep or freezing. Most women begged for him to touch them, but this one?

Should he have just walked away in Madripoor and never looked back? He had problems of his own that he didn't want to drag her into…

Leaning his cheek against her wild mop of hair, he laughed to himself. If only Jean-Luc could see him now. His father always said Remy was a sucker for a damsel in distress. This time, his weakness for the dramatic might get him killed.

The ship shuddered around them, and a loud grinding noise echoed off the cargo holds metallic walls. Rogue jumped, and Remy held a hand over her mouth. Leaning forward, he kept his lips a heartbeat from the shell of her ear.

"We stoppin'," he whispered. "I think they droppin' anchor.

* * *

 _Bam Bam Bam!_

Remy winced. The pounding was loud enough to wake the dead, certainly loud enough to draw the attention of the neighbors, but nobody answered the door. He knew she was home, the slight twitch of an upstairs window shade had given her away. He knocked again, louder this time.

"Open up, Wild One!" he hissed from the darkened alley in his rusty Japanese.

Their decision had been forced on them when the boat had docked and the crew had begun unloading all of its shipping containers. The pair had snuck off and spent the last few hours playing tag with the streetlights and tourists in what they had figured out was Tokyo, winding deeper into the seedier parts of the city in search of sanctuary. He had managed to steal a pair of cheap shoes for Rogue and a hoodie to cover her wrecked evening gown, but they were miles from any safe-house, not that he would be welcome after what he had done.

What they needed was help from someone who hated Farouk as much as Remy did.

He raised a fist to knock again. He and Rogue stuck out like sore thumbs, and it would be light soon. They'd have to move on if…

The door opened under his fist and a tiny woman with closely cropped hair and shrewd brown eyes peered through the crack.

"It was stupid of you to come here, Gambit," the woman taunted. "The Yashida's and their atomic dog heel to Farouk!" She made to slam the door in his face, but Remy wedged his foot in the opening.

"Yukio! Please, we just need a few hours to figure out our next move!"

"Ha!" she snorted. "A few hours or a hundred, it won't matter. Don't you know? You're a dead man walking!"

She kicked at his foot, and Remy winced in pain but kept it firmly in place. The two played tug of war with the door.

Behind him, Rogue stepped forward.

"Stop this! You're only drawing more attention to us!"

Remy froze, Yukio, too. Rogue's Japanese was flawless.

The girl stood close to him, her upper arm against his, and lowered the hood of her stolen sweatshirt. "From the stories my father told me, I expected more of a Ronin."

Yukio gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. She stared at Rogue for a few silent moments before opening the door wide and ushering them inside, locking a row of deadbolts solidly behind them.

Ronin, a masterless samurai. It was what Yukio called herself, and it was the reason Remy had hoped the fabled Wild One would help them. Over the years, Yukio had been an occasional ally to the Guild and seemed to delight in skirting the edge of the Shadow King's boundaries, but Remy supposed even rebels had their limits.

"Thank you, Yukio," Remy started, but the woman shook her head.

"Don't. You have a place to rest and clean up, but I want you gone by nightfall tomorrow. There's a price on your head, LeBeau, and if Farouk's people come for you, I'm collecting."


	7. Chapter 7

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

* * *

 **Raven**

Scalphunter's hit had been followed by an injection, and whatever drug they gave her lasted the trip to Cairo.

Raven was aware enough that the helicopter had landed, and that she had spent most of the trip with her head resting in that bastard Greycrow's lap, but of what had been said she had no memory. Over the years she had learned to hold a shape - asleep or awake, unconscious or not - until she triggered another transformation, and this skill was the only thing that had saved her so far from a slit throat. If she ran into a power dampener, she was fucked.

Scalphunter flung her over his shoulder again and though she tried, her arms and legs did little more than twitch at her command. With her head facing the man's backside she couldn't see what was happening, but the sounds she heard turned her insides. The sobs and screams of the other captives were met with the sickening crunch of flesh on bone and the electric sizzle of Tasers.

Logan was a problem she had not anticipated. Where was he? The Elixir seemed to be working for Raven so far, no crazed telepath had outed her the second they landed, though she was sure the true test was coming in the form of this 'Emma' Storm had spoken of, presumably Emma Frost, Farouk's favorite psychic. But Logan? She knew he had taught himself to shield his thoughts with some meditation garbage Raven had never been able to master, but that technique was on more of a passive level. She didn't know if his shielding would hold up against a direct, brain peeling assault. She feared for her old friend, but feared for herself the most if he caught wind of her scent.

Worst of all, Rogue had become a gnawing distraction in the pit of her stomach. Where the hell was the girl? Was she here? Had she been captured? Raven needed to find out. If Farouk had finally gotten his hands on her, Raven knew she shared the blame.

All the years spent trying to gain entrance, and the only view Raven got of Farouk's Egyptian palace was John Greycrow's behind. She added John's name to her list, imagining how she would make him beg and suffer before she gouged his eyes out. She tried to listen closely as she was drug off to her doom or whatever Emma had in store for her, but the palace was vast and there was too much activity. It was difficult to tell how many rooms they passed, and she lost count of how many turns they had taken, though they were clearly climbing floors. There was a humiliating bounce against Greycrow's butt-cheek up several staircases, and the air grew steadily warmer.

"Enter,"a woman's voice purred through an intercom before Scalphunter had the chance to knock. Raven caught a glimpse of Persian carpet laid over hand-painted tiles.

"Wish you wouldn't do that, Frost," Scalphunter grumbled and tossed Raven's limp body onto a fainting couch. She couldn't brace herself and her head crashed into the back, her arm twisted awkwardly above. "At least let me pretend you ain't reading my mind."

"Yes, well, we both know it's hardly Pulitzer Prize winning material up there, don't we John?"

Even with her eyes closed, Raven could sense the tension between the two mutants. Both were obviously high up on Farouk's food chain, but Raven doubted the Shadow King fostered teamwork amongst his minions.

The cloying smell of gardenia blossoms enveloped Raven. "And what do we have here?" A soft hand untwisted Raven's arm and felt for the pulse at her wrist, then placed a palm against her forehead.

"Storm wanted you to check her out personally, guess she's one of the King's favorites," Scalphunter grunted. "Alison Blaire, the…"

"Yes," Emma interrupted. "The Dazzler. A rather limited musical talent, but I could see where some would find her…appealing."

Raven felt a strange digging sensation at the edges of her mind, like someone trying to pry a lid off of a stuck container. Emma grabbed Raven's chin and forced her head from side to side.

"Strange. I remember the news stories concerning her rather sordid fall from grace, but I don't remember ever hearing that she was resistant to telepathy."

"No shit?" Greycrow mused.

Raven's insides squirmed. She was still in danger, but at least the Elixir seemed to be doing its job.

"Well, I'm getting nothing from her other than an awareness that a mutant is draped across my chaise. So, unless you inflicted a severe amount of brain damage on her during your trip to my office, I would say her mind is a locked door."

"Storm's not going to like that," Greycrow countered.

"I would think not. I'm sure there are other ways to vet this woman - fingerprints, retinal scans or other things of the sort - if Ororo insists. The Dazzler lost her powers along with her career so she shouldn't pose much of a physical threat, but one can't be too careful. I'll question her once she regains consciousness, but I suppose Ororo will want reassurances and a way to restrain her, if she doesn't want to throw the woman straight into the incinerator, that is."

Raven cursed herself when her heart skipped a beat. Emma's fingers were still curled around her wrist, and those fingers lightly stroked Raven's skin.

"Be a dear, John, and let Ororo know?"

"You gonna be okay up here with her by yourself?" Greycrow's voice had moved towards the door, and Emma laughed.

"I can handle her. If it makes you feel like a man, you are certainly welcome to watch."

A grunt and a slam signaled Scalphunter's exit, and Raven felt Emma get up from the sofa. There was the sound of opening drawers and rummaging, then the woman's weight alongside her again.

"Nasty stuff they gave you," Emma whispered. "Let's see if I can't fix that."

The sharp jab of a hypodermic needle would have made Raven jump if she could move. Seconds later, heat spread from the needle Emma held under her skin, and Raven forced her eyes open.

"There you are," Emma smiled and slowly withdrew the needle. "Better?"

Raven swallowed and did her best to nod, but control of her body was slow in coming.

"Yes, darling, I know," Emma simpered, and brushed the hair from Raven's forehead. "It's all a bit overwhelming, isn't it?"

Emma Frost was not yet thirty, but hers was a beauty that demanded upkeep. Platinum blonde hair flat-ironed to within an inch of its life in the desert air framed a face coated in a thick layer of makeup. Fake breasts threatened to burst free from the white silk corset the woman wore, screaming more porn star than serious threat to Raven, but it would be dangerous to judge someone like Frost at face value. There was a reason this woman had climbed the Shadow King's ranks, and Raven would have to tread lightly if she expected to survive.

The Elixir was proving to be a doubled-edged sword - it was protecting her mind from telepathic probes, but it had also piqued Frost's curiosity. If no one could read Raven's mind, no one could verify who she was, Alison Blaire or otherwise, and no one could verify her intentions. It may be that she was more of a risk than she was worth, unless Raven could continue to play the part of the helpless pop star.

"Please," Raven panted through the start of crocodile tears. "What…what is going to happen to me?"

Frost leaned closer and patted Raven's cheek. "That is the question, darling. You've been a naughty girl, haven't you, hiding yourself from the Shadow King? And, now you're here, and I can't read your mind to tell him why." The fingers resting on Raven's cheek trailed down to trace the neckline of her ruined evening gown, and she had to stop herself from snapping Frost's arm in two. "I could say that makes you a very dangerous woman. Or...I could not." Frost leaned over and brushed her lips against Raven's.

"The choice is yours, Alison."

* * *

 **Remy**

The apartment Yukio hid them in was spacious by Tokyo standards, beautifully decorated with a minimalist touch of light wood and rice paper screens, but Remy soon realized it wasn't quite large enough, and seemed to be getting smaller by the second.

He was restless. The pair of them had been pent up together in that freighter for days without a shred of privacy. The constant fear of being caught had kept Remy's thoughts off of other matters, for the most part anyway, but now that they had a place to sit and somewhere warm to sleep for the night, his mind headed straight for the gutter. Every time he turned around he was brushing up against Rogue, the scent of her even after too many days on that ship kicking his libido into overdrive.

He shook his head to clear it. First thing first - they needed a plan, somewhere to go in the morning, but his mind was losing focus watching Rogue pace around the room, tripping her long fingers curiously over the simple wooden furniture. Remy sat perched along the edge of the bed, low to the ground but raised on a platform in the center of the room. Only the one bed. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees in an effort to hide the raging hard on making its presence known. Merde, he thought, how was he going to make it through the night?

Rogue had discarded the stolen hoodie on a nearby chair. Her dress – which, in mint condition, had left little to the imagination - was a shambles. Remy ran a hand across his jaw and held his breath. They were running for their lives, he reminded himself, she had powers that made anything he was imagining impossible. Or, the throbbing between his legs urged, he just needed the opportunity to get a little creative.

"You wanna go first?"

Her voice, the first words either of them had uttered since Yukio left, made him jump.

He blinked up at her rapidly. "Pardon?"

"A shower." She gestured to one of the sliding panels. "You want first crack, or should I?"

Gallantry won out over the days of filth covering his body. "Where I come from, chere," he smirked, "it's always ladies first." He really hadn't meant it as dirty as it sounded, but Rogue's cheeks burned a bright pink.

"Th…thanks," she mumbled and snatched the change of clothes Yukio had given her on the way to the bathroom, closing the screen behind her.

Remy exhaled loudly. This girl was killing him. If the Shadow King didn't take him out, then his balls were going to fucking explode and finish the job.

He had no idea what their next move should be. They needed to get out of Tokyo, but he didn't think the rest of Japan was going to be any better for them. Anywhere in Europe or Africa was out of the question, most of Asia just as dicey. Rogue had talked about growing up in the Canadian Rockies. If they could get across the Pacific, maybe Canada would be a good place to hole up? Things were pretty rough in the states when he left and he needed to steer clear of the Midwest, but there were fewer people to avoid north of the border. They could get a cabin in the wilderness somewhere, some little place by a lake where he could lay her down by the fire…

He was alone for the first time in days, and his hand found its way into his pants as he imaged every dirty thing he had wanted to do to Rogue since they met in Madripoor. He couldn't keep walking around with a loaded gun, he reasoned. He'd have to make it fast and clean himself up in the shower, and his mind conjured up the thought of her dripping wet and naked, screaming his name…

"Remy?"

He wrenched his hand from his pants just before the paper screen to the bathroom slid open and Rogue's head popped out.

"Yeah, chere?" he croaked breathlessly, his heart hammering in his chest. He hadn't been caught like that since he was a damned teenager, but Rogue seemed not to have noticed.

"Can you…come help me?" She was chewing her bottom lip, something he noticed she did when she was nervous or lost in thought.

"Sure t'ing." He stood only when she disappeared back into the bathroom, and walked like he imagined a cowboy would, wide legged and slow.

Inside, the bathroom was marble floors and walls. A large wooden tub sat in an alcove on the opposite side of the room from a shower stall. Rogue had started the tub filling, and the steam clouded over the mirror above the sink and the glass surrounding the shower.

Rogue turned her back to him and lifted her thick curls from the nape of her neck. "My zipper's stuck," she confessed.

Remy swallowed. "You picked the right man for the job, chere. Ain't never been a safe I couldn't crack."

Their eyes met in the mirror, but he cleared his throat and moved his gaze to the back of her dress. The teeth of the zipper had gotten tangled in what was left of the delicate fabric, and after a generous amount of tugging, he was able to pull it open. His eyes returned to the mirror as he slid it slowly down.

"Thanks, sugar," she whispered. When he made to leave the room, she lightly touched his shoulder. Facing him, she held the front of her dress with one hand, the curve of her bare back visible in the mirror. "You could stay," she implored, and Remy's mouth fell open.

"Quoi?"

With her free hand, Rogue pointed to the tub. "You could stay. I know you're tired. There's a privacy screen that I could pull closed so you can shower while I take a bath." Her cheeks flared pink again for even suggesting it, but she babbled on. "I just thought that we could talk about what we're gonna do next, and it would save time so we could get into bed…so we could get some _rest_ sooner."

He couldn't stop the grin that spread across his face. "Now, you not just trying to catch a little peek of me in my birthday suit, are you chere?"

She rolled her eyes and practically slammed the sliding screen separating them. He chuckled to himself as he started the shower and peeled the filthy bodysuit from his skin.

"So, what's our next move?" Rogue's voice was a little muffled when he stepped under the water.

The warm jets soaked his hair and poured down the corded muscles of his back. "What you think of Canada?" he shouted. When he opened his eyes, he could see the silhouette of her body behind the paper screen.

"I think it's cold," she dismissed, stripping her dress off and kicking it aside. It may have been just the darkened shadow of her naked body, but Remy could see every curve in crisp detail.

"You don't like Canada?" he asked, and his hand closed around the erection that had never gone away. Rogue paused before stepping into the tub, and twisted her hair on top of her head.

"No, it's not that."

Her silhouette bent over to test the water, and Remy imagined climbing into the tub with her.

"Just wondering if a lil' ol' swamp rat like you could handle so much snow," she teased. "That's all."

There was the splash of the water as she broke the surface, the thought sending Remy over the edge. He leaned one arm against the marble of the shower wall and finished himself off, shuddering to completion. He leaned back under the water and let it trail down his skin like the warm massage of fingers.

"Believe me, chere, ain't nothing I can't handle."

* * *

Though Remy was exhausted, he had tried to offer Rogue the bed, electing to sleep on one of the bamboo mats, but she had dismissed his chivalry with a wave of her gloved hand. Instead, he was stretched out on his back on top of the crisp sheets, what passed for pillows lined up between him and Rogue like a fort.

"So…how would we get to Canada?" Rogue was lying on her side facing him, her damp curls spread across her pillow. "Another freighter?"

Remy turned his face to hers. "Non. No more freighters."

"Then how?" she prodded. "We got no passports, no money…"

"I can get us money," Remy interjected, and Rogue scowled.

"Ya can't steal it!" Her decibel level was rising with her irritation, and Remy leaned towards her.

"We don't have much choice here, Rogue. Your scruples ain't worth more than your life, least not to me."

Her eyes flashed, but she didn't respond. Remy had done plenty of things he wasn't proud of in his young life, and he'd be damned if he didn't use his talents to protect this girl.

"I'll get us the money, then we can buy anything we need, passports included. Yukio will know people."

Rogue snorted. "Cause she's been so helpful so far," she muttered, but Remy held her gaze with his in the dim light.

"Hasn't she? I know she's kickin' us out come tomorrow, but she puttin' her life on the line for us, cherie. Believe that."

Rogue didn't say anything, and turned away from him onto her other side. Remy knew that despite her tough attitude, Rogue was just as scared as he was. How had they gotten so deep into this mess? It had only been dumb luck that had kept them from getting caught so far, but how long would that hold? Didn't matter, Remy told himself. He was with her until the end.

"Rogue?" He reached over the pillows and touched her shoulder. "Everything gon' be fine, chere."

She stayed silent, and Remy worried for a tortured heartbeat that he had overstepped, but she closed her fingers around his.

"Promise?" she asked.

"Promise."

* * *

He was knee deep in an old nightmare when his eyes snapped open, the phantom image of ghostly skin and glowing red eyes replaced by reality and the glow of streetlights through the windows.

Rogue was curled up against the pillows between them, fast asleep and breathing softly. He could hear the hum of traffic below, but something wasn't right, something had roused him, more than just reliving old terrors. His years of training put his senses on high alert, and he reached under his own pillow to find the deck of cards hidden there. His movement woke Rogue.

"Wha izzit…" she mumbled drowsily, but Remy was already on his feet.

"We need to go, cherie," he whispered, pawing through the dark for their shoes. Everything else they owned was on their backs.

She sat bolt upright. "Remy, what?"

He held up a hand to quiet her. Voices in the hallway. Gruff, whispered - _English_. Rogue was out of bed and shoving her feet into borrowed shoes without him saying anything else. The voices were moving their direction, blocking the apartment's main exit. That left them the windows, but they were twenty stories up with no fire escape, and his rappelling wire hadn't survived Madripoor. He stuffed his own feet into his boots, and Rogue bent over beside him.

"Air vents," she hissed into his ear, gesturing to a metal grate close to the ceiling.

Quick and quiet as they could, they pried open the vent's cover and Remy laced his fingers to help her climb up. His ears strained for the sound of footsteps growing closer. When Rogue was clear, he hoisted himself into the narrow space. She was moving through the vent ahead of him, and with his palms against the slick sides he shimmied in. The grate's cover clapped shut behind him. He could crawl, but just barely, and caught up to Rogue in time to hear the splintering of the door to the apartment they had left behind. Rogue froze at the rip of machine gun fire that followed, but Remy shoved her forward with a hand on her backside.

 _Move, move, move_ , he wanted to scream, but they could only go so fast without the rippling noise of metal giving them away. There was light ahead - another vent that led to the floor's shared hallway. Remy caught Rogue's ankle and gave it a warning squeeze. Whoever was tearing up Yukio's safe house apartment could have more people waiting out in the hall.

Ignoring the heat and the feeling of her body pressed against his, Remy squeezed alongside Rogue to peer out of the metal grate. Sure enough, a young Asian man in a suit was leaning back against the opposite wall of the hall below, impatiently inspecting his fingernails. Staying out of the light, Remy got as close as he could, pinning Rogue between himself and the metal to catch a closer look. The guy was all too familiar. A woman joined him, and Remy's heart stopped. The woman stood a head taller than the man, and she was as broad as a football player, her short hair dyed a deep purple. Scrambler was his name, and she was Arclight, two mutants who were members of the Marauders - the Shadow King's favorite band of mercenaries. Remy's earlier nightmare bubbled up like a bad piece of fish in his belly.

"This was a waste of time," Arclight grumbled, and leaned next to her teammate against the wall.

"No shit?" Scrambler snickered. "We've only been two steps behind them since Madripoor."

Remy did his best to let Rogue have a look, and her heart beat a jackhammer against his chest. Their faces were close enough together to feel the electricity between them. He so wanted to kiss her, powers be damned. If they were about to die, Remy couldn't think of a better way to go.

A shadow fell across the floor of the hallway. "We should have brought Creed," a gruff voice conceded, and it was all Remy could do to keep still. The third mutant that had joined the pair in the hall was a man Remy knew as John Greycrow - Scalphunter. Greycrow and his soldiers had secured their place in Farouk's world by trading on the misery of others.

"Bed's still warm," Scalphunter grunted. "They ain't far."

Green eyes as big as saucers met Remy's. They were sitting ducks, especially if the Marauders had any of Farouk's telepaths in tow. He wanted to tell Rogue he would fight for her, give his life for hers, and tried to pour all of that feeling into his stare. They would make it. Somehow, someway, he was going to get her out of this.

"Check the other apartments on this floor," Scalphunter barked. "Maybe they heard us comin' and somebody's hiding them."

The three mutants disappeared from sight, and Remy untangled from Rogue and crawled further along the vent. At the end of the hall was a bank of elevators and the stairs. In the crawl space ahead, another spill of light signaled an opening in the wall. Remy paused to listen. There were new sounds - doors being kicked in, screams that twisted his insides, innocent people pleading in Japanese, begging for mercy. In the faint light, Rogue's face mirrored their torment. People were being hurt because of them. But, what could they do? They were outgunned, outnumbered, and all alone in a foreign land. Call him a selfish motherfucker, Remy thought, but his life and her life were all that mattered, and he wanted to keep them out of the Marauders' sights.

He shoved open the vent cover and checked to make sure the bastards were still occupied, then dropped into the hall on a whisper. Gritting his teeth, Remy fought the impulse to charge into the neighboring apartment with all cards blazing. All that would do was get him killed and Rogue captured, and then what would happen to her? What would happen to him? He had escaped Essex once – his father's life the cost of his freedom – and Remy didn't know if he was strong enough to do it again.

He caught Rogue when she dropped down next to him, and the look on her face ripped him to pieces. _Dammit_. Their escape was right over her shoulder, but Remy knew they couldn't just stand by and let those animals torture innocent people, he'd never be able to live with himself.

Instead of heading down the stairs, Remy stepped softly towards the apartment nearest them, the door hanging from its hinges like a loose tooth. Inside, furniture was overturned, paintings ripped from the wall and torn, vases smashed. A couple huddled together on the floor in their pajamas, and Scrambler stood over them and laughed hysterically with his back to the doorway. Remy stepped up and tapped Scrambler on the shoulder. When the man turned, Remy cocked a fist back and laid him out cold with one punch. Scrambler crumpled to the floor in an unconscious heap, and Rogue nodded in fierce approval. One down, two to go, Remy thought, but Scrambler was the easy one.

Pulling a card from his pocket, Remy charged it and headed back into the hall where Arclight was waiting.

" _Scalp!"_ she shrieked from two doors down.

Remy snatched Rogue's hand and they raced for the stairs. Arclight bent down and clapped her hand against the floor, rolling a wave of seismic energy towards them. The floor buckled and pitched them forward. Remy turned and threw the card before he slammed into the elevator's doors. The kinetically charged card hit Arclight in the shoulder and knocked her into Scalphunter emerging from an apartment across the hall.

"LeBeau!" Scalphunter challenged and tossed the wounded Arclight aside, bringing a long rifle to bear.

Remy sent a handful of cards, watching the methodical slow motion moves of the sharpshooter getting them in his sights. Rogue jumped up and hit the elevator button. The doors opened, and the pair of them tumbled backwards, the wood above his head exploding in a shotgun blast, Remy still tossing cards. Dragging him inside, Rogue closed the door and the two huddled in the corner as a hail of bullets peppered the elevator's doors. For a heartbeat, Remy thought it was the end, that the bullets had ruined the elevator and their escape. The lights flickered, but the car shuddered slowly downward.

Rogue held a hesitant hand to his cheek. "You okay?" she implored and patted the front of his shirt in search of bullet holes.

"We not safe yet, cherie," Remy reminded her, but squeezed her hand.

"I know, it's just…" She glanced over his shoulder to the back corner of the elevator car, and her mouth dropped open in a silent, horrified scream.

Remy shook her hard by the shoulders. "Rogue!?" He caught the thick, rusty smell of blood before he turned his head.

Sharing the elevator with them was Yukio's lifeless body, slumped in a dark red pool. She had taken one of Scalphunter's high caliber bullets to the chest, and her unseeing eyes accused Remy from the grave. He had brought her into this mess, and her death was on his hands.

The elevator hit the ground floor. They didn't have much of a lead on Scalphunter, and didn't know how many more assailants could be waiting for them. The Marauders' numbers fluctuated with every job, the Guild could never predict who they could run afoul of when it came to the band of mercenaries. Even Marauders thought killed in action would resurface time and again, unpredictability one of the group's strongest assets.

The doors slid open, and they edged slowly from the car. Remy kept one hand on Rogue behind him, and one hand armed and ready. The pair shuffled into the lobby. Broken glass littered the marble floor, and more blood spread from behind the security desk, a pair of legs surrounded by a sea of crimson. Rogue broke free from Remy's grasp and knelt next to the horizontal security guard to check for a pulse. She shook her head and retrieved the guard's gun. They moved for the exit.

The apartment where Yukio had hid them was on as deserted street as one could find in Tokyo, but even so the eerie stillness that greeted them outside sent shivers down Remy's spine. They needed to run, to find a new place to hide, but Remy felt like his feet were glued to the floor. Scalphunter would be right behind them. Why was he unable to make himself step through the spider-webbed glass of the entrance?

"C'mon, sugar," Rogue urged and tugged on his arm, but two steps onto the sidewalk a wall of flames burst from nowhere, blocking their path. The intense heat drove them back towards the building, but another wall erupted behind them.

"Halt, gaijin!"

Overhead, a mutant made of flames hovered. The fire that surrounded them was at his command, and with outstretched fingers, the temperature of the furnace increased.

Through the smoke, Remy saw Rogue take aim with the gun, but the bullets were swallowed by the raging inferno pressing in on them. The scorching heat brought tears to Remy's eyes and burned his throat raw. His charged cards only popped against the flames, the snap of wet wood in a campfire. Too high to jump, too hot to run through, the circle closed in on them.

"Sunfire!" Scalphunter emerged from the building behind them. Remy pushed Rogue to the ground and shielded her body with his own. "You idiot!" Scalp raged. "We need 'em alive!"

Remy could hear Sunfire's laugher from the ground. "But," the flaming mutant mocked. "Alive doesn't mean unharmed!" The mutant barbecue's flames jumped.

Remy grabbed Rogue's face in his hands, her wild hair keeping their blistering skin from touching. "I'm so sorry, chere," he breathed against her lips. "I…"

An implosion of air and the unexpected smell of brimstone filled their space. Remy thought for a moment they had died and gone to hell as crouched next to them was a blue-furred demon, complete with yellow eyes, sharp teeth, and a forked tail that curled around Rogue's ankle.

"Guten tag, mein freunds."

The devil had a German accent. The demon, dressed in a black and red bodysuit, held a three-fingered hand towards them. "Bit hot in here, wouldn't you agree?"

To Remy's surprise, Rogue, still wrapped in his arms, held her gloved hand out to the man. With a wink, the demon bent to kiss it. At the moment of contact, the world turned itself inside out, along with Remy's stomach. Everything went black, and Remy felt his whole body sucked through a straw and spit back out again.

When the world righted itself, Remy turned his head and vomited. It took him a second to relate that his puke had spattered against a cold metallic floor, not a charbroiled sidewalk. The flames were gone. Rogue wretched next to him, but he wasn't steady enough to lift a finger to help her.

"I am sorry, fraulein," their savior the demon whispered gently. "The first trip is always difficult, I am told, made worse with passengers."

From his hands and knees, Remy forced his head up. The blue-furred man was helping a shaky Rogue into a seat perched in front of an electronic control panel. Remy stared blankly at the dancing lights. His eyes trailed around what appeared to be the cockpit of a very sophisticated jet, and it felt like they were airborne.

"Th…thank you." Rogue was still clutching the demon's hand.

The man bowed. "Damsels in distress are my specialty, fraulein."

Remy wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Who are you?" he croaked.

Behind him, a door swished open and a beautiful woman stepped through. Her hair was a wild mane of neon green, and she was followed by a younger man with sandy blonde hair, the pair dressed to match the demon's garb. All three of them wore an earpiece that resembled a futuristic Bluetooth.

"What a wonderful smell you've found, Kurt." The woman wrinkled her nose and stepped around Remy with a distasteful look.

"I'm on it, boss," the younger man proclaimed. An ice cold breeze shot from his outstretched fingers, and Remy's puddle of vomit froze into pink chunky crystals.

"Frozen puke is still puke, Bobby." The woman climbed into the pilot's seat and hit a button on the dash. "Blackbird to base. This is Polaris. We're headed your way, and we're bringing company."

"Hey!" Remy barked, commanding their attention as he staggered to his feet. "You didn't answer my question. Just who the hell are you people?"

The green haired woman – Polaris - swiveled her chair around. " _We_ are the people who saved your ass back there! Just who do the hell do you think _you_ are?"

The demon – Kurt - stepped between them. "Peace, Lorna. He asks a valid question." He turned to Remy, and those yellow eyes twinkled. "Tell me, mein freund - have you ever heard of…the X-Men?"


	8. Chapter 8

All characters owned by Marvel Comics

* * *

 **Logan**

The thunk of the axe rang heavy through the air, each breath a sharp burn in his lungs. Logan split the last log in one satisfying chop, and stooped to retrieve his leather jacket, stiff with cold against his sweaty skin. He loaded the sled with his morning's labors, and pulled it through the snow to the path he had shoveled through the trees. Emerging from the stand of pines, he could just make out the cabin in the grainy morning light, the hint of smoke coming from its chimney calling him home.

The cords of wood he piled on the porch next to the door, the snowy boots he stomped off and stepped out of before tiptoeing sock-footed through the entrance. A blanket of fire warmed air and the smell of bacon wrapped around him as he hung up his jacket.

"Coffee?"

Startled, Logan spun to the voice. A woman with dark brown eyes and shining black hair that reached to her waist stepped forward and held a steaming mug out to him. The skin on the back of his neck prickled.

"Fox?" he whispered hoarsely.

The woman's answering laughter was whiskey rich and deep. "Who else would it be?"

He took the mug and watched her busy herself in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a sizzling cast iron skillet. Silver Fox. They lived together in this cabin. She loved him, and he loved her, but instead of following her into the kitchen and wrapping his arms around her waist like he did most mornings, Logan stood rooted in place. Something didn't feel right. _Who else would it be_ , she had asked, but deep down Logan _had_ expected to see someone else when he opened the cabin door, someone with sharp green eyes.

The room swam before him, and he had to grab the door jamb to keep himself upright.

"Are you all right?" Fox had abandoned the eggs and come back to him, strong yet delicate hands brushing his forehead. So many nights his body had craved the caress of those hands, but today her touch made his skin crawl. Logan squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to clear the cobwebs clouding his brain.

"Logan, are you unwell?"

He caught her hands in his and stared at them. A sudden flash of memory - those same hands covered in blood, those deep brown eyes dead, lifeless. Logan squeezed hard enough to feel her bones grind against each other, and held her fast when she tried to pull away.

"Lady," he snarled, "just who the hell _are_ you?"

The memory solidified and brought with it the truth – Silver Fox was dead, but that had been years ago, another lifetime. Her death had pushed him over a cliff and set him on a path of death and destruction that had taken years to find his way back from, his lifeline coming in the form of a little girl with green eyes and an attitude.

"And where's Rogue?" He said her name before he remembered missing her, and as the sound crossed his lips, he knew it was his daughter he had expected to find in this cabin in the woods. They had been happy here once, before everything had changed.

The woman laughed, the sound different this time, cold and high and shrill. The dark hair and eyes changed color, becoming matching shades of purple, her skin fading to alabaster.

"It appears we will have to do this the hard way," she announced, her accent different, too, British, cultured, not the kind of woman you would find living rough in the woods.

He went for her throat, but the world twisted. Everything swirled to black, the choke of chains around his own neck enough to snap him back to reality. When he opened his eyes it was all gone - the cabin, the trees covered in quiet snow. Instead, Logan was in a cell, chained to a sandstone wall, his hands and claws encased in manacles. When his eyes cleared, the woman was still there, dressed in a silky whisper, her hair cascading down her back in violet waves. At her side, a face Logan had hoped to never see again in any lifetime.

"Nice of ya t'join us, runt."

Victor Creed - Sabretooth. A man Logan had considered a friend in that other life, until the bastard had gutted Silver Fox.

Logan snarled and lunged at the pair, a telepathic ice pick stopping him in his tracks. He clamped his jaws shut to keep from biting his own tongue off while his nervous system twitched the electric chair.

Creed's claws ripped hot across his stomach, tearing flesh like tissue paper. Logan's adamantium laced head butt knocked Creed back, but Sabretooth sprang to his feet, his next swipe connecting with Logan's throat. The chains stopped Creed from flaying open Logan's esophagus, but blood rained onto the floor beneath him just the same.

 _'Enough!'_

Logan and Creed both screamed this time, the psionic bolt a thunderclap inside their skulls.

"Watch it…frail," Creed growled at the woman as he staggered to his feet, but she didn't flinch.

"Your presence is hardly required, Victor. If you cannot behave yourself, I will have you forcibly removed. Do I make myself clear?"

When Creed stood, he was almost two feet taller than her and outweighed her by a good three hundred pounds, but when she levelled those purple eyes at Sabretooth, Logan swore he saw the bastard shake.

"Crystal," Creed mumbled.

If Logan's windpipe wasn't slashed to slowly healing ribbons, he would have laughed out loud.

Logan was filthy, starving, and dehydrated. He had no memories of how he had gotten to this place, much less where he was, but it didn't take a genius to figure it out. Creed was the Shadow King's flunky, and the best place to find telepaths these days was Cairo.

Taking as deep of breath as he could manage, Logan tried to find his center, to make his mind untouchable, trying to control the desperation that was choking him worse that the bloody tatters of his throat.

Madripoor was the last thing he remembered, taking the kid to Viper to hide her, but it had all gone to shit real fast. They had been ambushed by the Nazi's brats, and Rogue…panic broke his concentration. Rogue - what had happened to her? Had she gotten away, or was she here? Were they hurting her? If they harmed one hair on her head…

The woman was kneeling before him, the hem of her silk dress a piece of bread sopping up the blood gravy coating the floor. He jumped from her touch again, but she held him fast with her powers.

"So," she whispered, "I wasn't wrong after all. Love is the key. Love _is_ what separates the man from the beast, I merely miscalculated. For you, love of the flesh is fleeting, but love of family is all."

He felt icy fingers dive into the center of his brain and split it like a ripe melon, his throat healing in time to carry the sound of his screams.

* * *

 **Remy**

"Where you takin' us?"

An annoyed Polaris moved her eyes from the jet's controls and narrowed them at Remy. "You ask an awful lot of questions, Mister, without answering any yourself. Who are you?"

"De name is Gambit." Letting his accent roll, Remy inclined his head towards the back of the plane where Rogue was playing a hand of poker with Bobby and Kurt. "De lady is Rogue."

Rogue looked up when she heard her name. They had been riding in a jet full of strangers for nearly an hour, and he still hadn't been able to figure out if they were in the company of friends or foes. He had heard of the X-Men, of course, every mutant had. The heroes stood up to Farouk and offered sanctuary for those in need, but Remy had always thought they were just a myth. Were these… _kids_ …really the last hope for mutantkind?

Kurt, whose codename they had learned was Nightcrawler, draped a blanket over Rogue's shoulders. Remy practically kicked himself. He should know better than anyone not to judge a book by its blue-furred cover, but a Catholic upbringing made a forked tail and fangs hard for him to ignore.

Remy was pleased to see he was getting under Polaris's skin - nothing he enjoyed more than getting a pretty woman all hot and bothered. He could tell by her clenched jaw and pinched mouth that she was about two seconds away from screaming at him, but was working really hard to control her temper. If she was the X-Men's boss, she hadn't been for very long. There was more that was green about her than her neon hair.

"Well, _Gambit_ ," her upper lip curled into a sneer on his name. "You want to tell me what the hell you and your friend were doing back in Tokyo?"

Remy leaned back in the copilot's chair and rubbed his hand along his jaw. "You mean sides eatin' sushi?" he smirked and watched the red rise in her cheeks.

Polaris angled her chair towards and jabbed an angry finger to emphasize her every word. "Don't get smart with me! We saved your asses from a squad of Marauders, led by Shiro Yashida no less! What did you do to bring the wrath of the Shadow King down on your heads?"

His matched her aggressive posture. "And, what? You and your people jus' happened to find us? Just passin' on through? Give me a break." Their argument had silenced the card game, and the trio of younger mutants, Rogue in the lead, pushed to the front of the jet.

"Problem, sugar?" Her tone was casual, but the hand Rogue laid on his shoulder urged him to relax.

"Oh, no. No problem." Remy waved his hand flippantly. "We on the run, but they just happen to be there to scoop us up, taking us only they know where. Why would I have a problem wit' dat?"

"Gambit." The hand on his shoulder squeezed a brutal warning, but Remy shrugged it off.

"Look at that headin', Rogue." He gestured to the control panel. "You see that? That heading takes us to Antarctica. They must think we stupid, like we wouldn't notice. One thing I do know is there ain't nothin' in Antarctica! If you all gon' leave us to die in a frozen wasteland, I'd rather you just pop us now and dump our bodies into de ocean! Anything be better than bein' a frozen popsicle!"

"Hey!" Bobby warned, but Polaris rolled her eyes and turned back to the controls.

"Why would we save you just to kill you?" she snapped, and donned the jet's headset, positioning it around the earpiece that strobed tiny red lights in a strange sequence.

"You tell me, cherie."

Polaris pinched her lips again and spoke into the microphone. "Polaris to base. Requesting permission to land."

"Land!?" Remy stood and leaned into Polaris's personal space. "There ain't nothin' here!"

Ahead in the view screen was an endless expanse of white, impossible to tell where the clouds met the glaciers. He shivered at the sight of all that snow and wondered how the hell they were going to get out of this one.

Behind him, Rogue whispered to her new friends. "Kurt, where are you taking us?"

Remy glared at them. Kurt had put an arm around Rogue's shoulder in a brotherly fashion and pointed to the middle of the jet's windshield.

"Just wait for it, fraulein."

Rogue's confused eyes met Remy's angry ones, but seconds later hers flickered from his to the windshield and widened in surprise.

"Oh mah gawd!" she whispered, and her hands flew to cover her mouth. Remy whipped his head back to the window and his jaw fell to the floor.

"What de hell?"

A circle of vibrant green had appeared smack in the center of the blinding white, getting bigger every second.

Polaris put her hands on the controls and glared at Remy from the corner of her eye. "We're landing, people. You might want to strap in."

Without taking his eyes from that smear of green, Remy found a seat and buckled the belt, Rogue strapped in behind him. When the jet cleared the cloudbank, the green filled the cockpit's windows, and as they began their descent the leaves and fronds of tropical trees became visible.

"No freakin' way," Rogue exclaimed, and Remy felt her hand searching for his. He grasped it and gave her a supportive squeeze, though he was scared out of his mind. A jungle paradise in the middle of the frozen tundra. How was this possible? It was like something out of a movie.

"You sure we ain't already dead, cherie?" Remy asked Polaris.

Her laugh was more of a snort, but it was Bobby who leaned across the aisle and pointed to the window again.

"Or extinct?"

Remy looked to where he pointed, and Rogue squealed. A pair of Pterodactyls were flying loop de loops in front of the jet.

"Bon dieu," Remy hissed, and made the sign of the cross on his chest.

Kurt laughed. "I am not sure our Father has anything to do with a place such as this!"

Buildings became visible through the jungle canopy - gleaming towers of glass and steel arranged along the border of an expanse of cleared space large enough to house a small town. The towers were connected by a series of walls, reminding Remy of a hi-tech medieval castle.

Polaris landed the plane on a raised platform near what looked like a hangar bay. There were two figures standing in the bay's open doors, and as Remy and Rogue were prodded down the Blackbird's descending stairs, the men moved towards them.

"Saint's preserve us!" An older man with reddish blonde hair, in his forties but still muscular and scrappy looking, rushed forward with a sour expression on his freckled face. "What in god's name were ye thinkin', lass? Bringin' 'em here without clearance!?"

"Don't start with me, Sean," Polaris warned. "Farouk's people had them cornered. We didn't have a lot of choice."

"Oh, I would bloody well disagree with that!" Sean huffed, an Irishman from the sound of his accent and temper.

An implosion of air and that brimstone stink signaled Nightcrawler teleporting from the jet. "It's true, Sean." Kurt stretched and scratched his hands through his hair. "When we caught up with the Marauders, Shiro was ready to flambé them."

Behind Sean, a dark haired pile of muscle glowered at Kurt. "Shiro!?" The young man, twenty or so, stood well over six feet tall. He roared, light flashing around him, and his body swelled in size, his skin turning to shiny steel before their eyes. "Izmennik!"

Remy's Russian was worse than his Japanese, but he was well acquainted with that word – _traitor_ – and it took him a second to realize the Ruskie wasn't talking about him.

"You made the right decision, Lorna."

A third figure stepped from the shadows, and all the mutants save him and Rogue snapped to attention. The man was tall and elegant, and the same earpiece worn by the others glinted in his snowy white hair. His costume was red and black, and cut like a Nehru jacket with a cape thrown across the shoulders. He was older than Sean, but there was a predatory fierceness behind his bright blue eyes that belied his hospitable demeanor.

"Th…thank you, father," Polaris said breathlessly, her face pink with pride.

Father? Remy caught Rogue's eyes. Kurt and Bobby may have called Lorna boss, but it was clear they were meeting the X-Men's real head honcho - Magneto.

"The Savageland is a sanctuary for all mutants seeking a better way of life." The words were welcoming, but Remy felt those eyes moving over the both of them.

Sean exhaled loudly. "Aye, any enemy of Farouk's is a friend 'o the X-Men." The Irishman took a turn looking them over and Remy couldn't remember when he had felt more like a piece of meat. "Ye both look like hell," Sean declared instead. "We'll get ye fed and find ye some quarters so ye can shower and rest."

"Now, hold on," Remy interjected. "Who said we stayin'?"

The group of mutants started in surprise at his question.

"Why wouldn't you stay?" Lorna's temper was winding up again, but Remy could tell she didn't want to start screaming at him in front of her father. He pushed a little harder.

"Not that we didn't appreciate the "rescue", cherie," Remy put the air quotes in for good measure, "but you people basically kidnapped us."

Lorna's mouth fell open. "Kidnapped!?" she sputtered. "You lousy son of a…!"

"Gambit!" Rogue stepped between him and the green-haired mutant. "Forgive my friend," Rogue smiled sweetly at the X-Men, but dug her fingers into Remy's arm. "He's not usually such an ass. We've had a rough few days, and the lack of sleep is makin' him forget his manners."

Her emerald eyes shot a warning to his and he bit his tongue. At the moment, they were stuck with these people whether Remy liked it or not. Canada was awfully far away, especially with the frozen wasteland of Antarctica barring their path.

"I'm Rogue, and his name is Gambit, and we'd appreciate any hospitality y'all can offer." Rogue laid the Mississippi on thick, and her charm had the desired effect as the tension visibly ratcheted down.

Sean held out a hand "Welcome, Rogue. They call me the Banshee, but to you, darlin', it's just Sean." Rogue hesitated, Remy noticing her gloves weren't in the best of shape, but she gingerly took the hand offered her.

"And you, lad," Sean pumped Remy's outstretched hand. "Call me Mr. Cassidy."

The Russian's name was Peter Rasputin – Colossus - and Lorna's pops was Magneto, just like Remy had figured. Magneto's battles against Farouk were the stuff of legend, and Remy was oscillating between acting like a star-struck fanboy and acting, as Rogue put it, like an ass because he was scared that the man wouldn't quite live up to the myth. There was an arrogance emanating from Magneto, which Remy would expect, but also a thinly veiled fanaticism that made him uneasy. These were the people he was trusting with their lives?

An irritated Remy abandoned the guest quarters almost as soon as they left him alone.

He had taken a quick shower and changed into a set of red and black workout clothes he found in the closet, only to discover the saviors of mutantkind had locked him in his room like a common criminal. Even though the lock took him all of five seconds to pick, being caged like an animal did nothing for his paranoia. There was part of him that understood why they would have wanted to keep a stranger quarantined, but he was pissed and set off to find Rogue.

Free to roam, the thief in him took stock of his surroundings. The X-Men's base was light years beyond the technology of even the world's most powerful governments before they had fallen to Farouk. Walls fashioned out of some unknown metal, not steel or titanium or anything Remy had ever felt. Seamless glowing panels lit his way, computer touch screens set near each knob-less door. There was a low hum barely perceptible at the edges of Remy's hearing, and with his fingertips pressed to the smooth metal surrounding him he could feel the sound resonating beneath the surface. What was this place?

He fought the urge to bang his head against a wall. Separate rooms with locked doors? The X-Men's hospitality was getting worse by the second. Instead of being led to their quarters or fed as originally promised, he and Rogue had been given the once over in the X-Men's infirmary. After the Banshee had finished turning him inside out – doing everything shy of making him turn his head and cough - Remy had been shuffled out of the infirmary and into the upper levels of the one of the towers they had seen on their landing. Feeling more guinea pig than guest, Remy had the sneaking suspicion these people were intentionally keeping him from Rogue. Maybe checking to see that the strangers kept their stories straight?

Snapping him from his thoughts, a door slid open automatically at his approach, and Remy had to dodge a pack of kids rushing through, led by a gangly blonde boy. Not a one of them was past puberty.

Was this what a mutant paradise looked like? Kids laughing and horsing around without a care for the Shadow King or his slave pens? A proud Mr. Cassidy had blathered on about the X-Men's base really being a school, their mission to gather and teach kids to use their powers for the benefit of mutantkind, but a cynical Remy could only shake his head in disbelief. The world had become such a shitty place. Beyond the walls and the snow protecting them, these kids would face nothing but misery, forced into Farouk's service or forced underground, the price for either their innocence. No matter how good their defenses, the Shadow King would find them, and he would make them pay.

"3…2…1..!"

Ahead, a girl with choppy blonde hair stopped at the doorway and lobbed a glowing sphere towards the pack's leader. Most of the kids screeched and kept running down the hall, but the blonde boy stood his ground, along with another who stepped up – this kid with darker skin and darker hair, but just as young. The dark haired boy started glowing with his own energy and caught the sphere, holding it between his palms where the sphere burst with a muffled explosion.

"Tabby!"

The blonde girl laughed and raced away, the two boys giving chase, nearly mowing down a beautiful red haired woman walking down the hall. This one was closer to Remy's age.

"Take it outside!" the woman scolded, and froze to let the kids whiz by on either side of her. Her wide smile reached giant green eyes - not quite the same shade as Rogue's, but still very pretty. Upon seeing Remy, her smile disappeared as surely as if he had wiped it from her face. She took a few halting steps forward, but stopped several feet from him.

"I can't hear you," she stated, blinked, and tilted her head.

Remy blinked back. "That's 'cause I didn't say anything, petite," he teased, but the woman continued to stare at him, then starting walking forward again, circling him like a wary dog sniffing another.

"I can't hear you," she said again and moved closer.

"Well, I best speak up then, cherie. I said…" His tongue froze. Though he tried, he was unable to form another syllable, his mouth held in an invisible vice grip.

"Shush," the woman ordered. "How can I _hear_ you if you won't stop _talking_?" She was on the short side - five-four, five-five at the most - but reached up and grabbed his head, roughly tilting it side to side to inspect Remy's ears, ignoring his gurgled protests. She let go of him and the vice grip on his mouth relaxed. "Who are you?" she asked cautiously.

Charm always suited him best, so he bent to kiss her hand. "De name is Gambit, but a belle femme such as yourself can call me Remy." He released her hand, and she stared at where his lips had been.

"What are you doing here?" she continued questioning him.

He chuckled. "Been trying to figure that out myself, petite. My lady friend and I got rescued by your X-Men, and then we…"

The vice grip slapped his mouth again. "No. _Here_. What are you doing _here_ , wandering the halls by yourself? Are you lost?" She was holding his tongue with some power she had, and Remy gestured for her to let him go.

"I'm not lost. Least I don't think I am. Just trying to find my friend, Rogue. They took us to the infirmary, but I don't know…"

The woman grabbed his hands and a determined scowl darkened her features. "Come with me." She tugged at his arms with whatever power had been holding his mouth shut.

"Now, petite," he protested, "just wait!"

His tongue stilled mid complaint, and he found himself levitated down the hall.


	9. Chapter 9

Author's note: It's been a little while, hopefully everybody remembers where we left off...

* * *

 **Magnus**

"And where are they now?"

Magnus glanced up from the tablet in his hands to Sean, who sighed and ran a rough hand through his wiry hair.

"I took the lad, Gambit, to the guest quarters like ye asked," Sean answered. "Lorna was takin' the girl, Rogue, to get a wee bite to eat before she took her on a tour."

"A tour?"

"Aye," Sean chuckled, "that's what I thought. After all they been through, I would have wanted nothin' more than a shower and forty winks, but the lass seemed more concerned with fillin' her belly and takin' a look around."

A quick check of the clock indicated it was just after breakfast. Magnus had been so immersed in his work that he hadn't paused to eat. Nothing but an empty tea cup sat on the edge of his desk.

Hopefully, Magnus thought, Lorna had enough sense to keep the stranger away from the prying eyes of the younger students, at least until they had a chance to question her further to determine what threat, if any, she and her companion posed.

"Interesting." Magnus let his eyes drift to the tablet again. Onscreen was the data from the preliminary exams performed on the two newcomers. The young man, Gambit, was an energy converter. Further tests to push the boundaries of those abilities would be simple enough, as well as testing what appeared to be agility and dexterity that far outstripped even peak athletes. But, the girl…

" _Interesting_ ," Sean repeated. "That's all ye have to say?"

Magnus raised his eyes again, and Sean gestured to the tablet before crossing his arms over his chest.

"Have ye ever heard of a power like that?"

Magnus inhaled and shook his head. "A mutant who could theoretically commandeer the abilities of any other being on the planet? Never. The implications of such a gift are staggering."

The girl could duplicate mind and powers with merely a touch of her skin, the length of the transfer corresponding to the length of physical contact. She could become anyone. How far had she pushed theses abilities? How many could she absorb at any given time? Was there a way to make such a transfer…permanent? Too many questions, and welcoming such an unknown variable into their midst made Magnus uneasy. He wished Lorna had obeyed his orders to quarantine the girl and her cohort.

He leaned back in his chair and laid the tablet on the computer console before him. "We must begin further tests immediately."

"Tests?" Sean scoffed. "Not bloody likely. Did ye read through the rest of her examination?"

"Of course," Magnus snapped. The girl could not control her powers, and had been denied the simple human interactions most people took for granted since their manifestation.

"Doesn't sound like she uses her powers unless she has to," Sean continued. "It'll be hard to convince her otherwise."

"Nonsense." Magneto stood and tugged the hem of his jacket down into place. "First and foremost, we are a school. Who better to help her gain control of her gift?"

Sean shook his head and leaned a slim hip against the computer console. "There's where yer wrong, man. This girl hasn't been able t'touch another human being for years. Things you and I take for granted - handshakes, hugs, along with all the other things a young lady would be lookin' forward to when she becomes a woman - have all been off limits to her. I'm bettin' she's kept herself on a tight leash, and I don't foresee her changin' her habits to satisfy yer curiosity."

Magnus frowned. "One thing she doesn't need from us is our pity," he said harshly.

Sean's face reddened in response, and Magnus saw the muscles in his square jaw twitch. "Don't you be mistakin' empathy for pity. Tryin' to understand how she feels isn't pitying her in the least. Seeing things from someone else's perspective for a change could do ye a world of good!"

With that, Sean stomped from the room, reminding Magnus - not for the first time - of his late wife, Moira. Sean hailed from Ireland, Moira from Scotland, but the two had more personality traits in common than Magnus was comfortable counting. If the pair had ever had the chance to meet, he was sure they would have been friends and colleagues. At the least, their arguments would have been the stuff of legend.

He and Sean were hardly what you would call great friends, but the Banshee had been a much needed advocate in the years since Moira's murder, his insight invaluable to Magnus. Together, they had saved dozens of young mutants from the Shadow King, but Magnus couldn't help wondering if working to form the X-Men hadn't in fact saved Sean Cassidy.

When they had first met, Sean was a detective who had enlisted Magnus' help in locating his estranged daughter, a young mutant named Theresa. Their partnership unfortunately hadn't produced a happy ending as the girl had been killed in a car accident along with her mother. Instead of giving in to grief, Sean had thrown himself into helping Magnus continue the work of Moira and of Charles Xavier. The Banshee had saved countless other children where he had been unable to save his own, one thing he and Magnus had in common.

Magnus exited his office, the room perched high atop the tallest tower. From the wall of windows, on a clear day, he could catch a glimpse of the snowy carpet that lay beyond their jungle paradise.

He sighed. Sean had a large heart that often blinded him to logic, but that didn't mean he was wrong. Perhaps a little compassion would be warranted with the girl. She obviously had been through a great deal these last few days, if not years. Such a unique mutant power would hardly have escaped Farouk's notice, yet she had somehow evaded the King's slave pens. For the X-Men's safety, Magnus needed to find out how. He didn't much care for unanswered questions, and two mutants springing from nowhere certainly raised a few. Confronting this Rogue on her own would be preferable, Magnus reasoned, and set off to find her.

He didn't search for long. She and Lorna were strolling through the gardens that filled the center of the complex. His daughter's face brightened at his approach.

"Hello, father!"

Lorna tried so very hard, but if Magnus were honest with himself, she tried a bit too hard to gain his affection. It wasn't her fault. Lorna was an intelligent and capable child, and would make most fathers very proud. No, the fault lay entirely with him. Since losing Moira and Wanda, Magnus had kept his surviving children at arm's length. He and Pietro had never been able to repair the damage between them, but Lorna so desperately wanted something more than he was willing to give.

"Lorna, I believe Sean was looking for you. He requested your assistance while performing maintenance on the Blackbird."

It wasn't an outright lie. Sean had mentioned at the start of the briefing that he would need to look at the jet after its last flight, but Magnus felt a twinge at his twisting of the truth.

"Oh." Lorna's face fell, and she glanced between Rogue and Magnus before plastering a smile on her face that did not reach her eyes. "Of course, father. Right away. If you will excuse me?"

Magnus watched Lorna's hurried steps carry her towards the hangar. When he turned to face Rogue, the girl was leaning in to inhale the fragrance of the Allspice plant, one of many prehistoric florae decorating the gardens.

"Calycanthus occidentalis," he stated. His voice must have startled her. She jumped, and her cheeks flared a matching shade to the flower's pink petals.

"I beg your pardon?" Green eyes the color of the plant's leaves stared at him. Her voice held the faintest trace of a Southern United States' accent.

"Calycanthus occidentalis, from the Cretaceous Era. One of the few prehistoric plants to survive in the world beyond."

"Guess the dinosaurs weren't so lucky?" she smirked, and nodded towards the Pterodactyl swooping low circles along the forcefield blanketing them.

Despite himself, Magneto laughed. Strange that he couldn't remember the last time he had actually laughed. It had been so long the noise sounded foreign, a rusted engine in need of oil.

He held an elbow out to the girl. "Perhaps I could continue your tour?"

She hesitated, but took the arm he offered. He steered her along the flagstone path that wound its way through the manicured lushness of the gardens. The air was heady, thick with the perfume of the plants that once covered the Earth like a carpet. Magnus wasn't sure where to begin. He had so many questions that needed answering, but he didn't want to put her on the defensive. He wanted her to feel as if she could trust him.

Ahead, several of the younger students emerged from the dormitories and chased each other in circles around the base of a large palm tree. His first instinct was to direct Rogue down another path - if she was dangerous, he wanted to keep her far away from the others. The quarters he had chosen for Rogue and Gambit were purposefully isolated from the younger students, and he had intended to keep their presence quiet until he had a chance to interview them both further. But, she stopped, and the soft smile on her face gave him pause.

She was young, barely past twenty, and had never known a world free of Amahl Farouk and his murderous hatred. It was clear from the expression on Rogue's face that it had been a long time since she had seen children at play.

Magnus recognized Rahne Sinclair, Moira's ward, before the laughing girl jumped and transformed mid-leap, shifting to her lupine form and tackling Danielle Moonstar. Normally he would have frowned at such horseplay, but today it felt good to see Rahne enjoying life. The girl had loved Moira very dearly, and had never been the same since her death.

Why, Magnus wondered, was Moira in his thoughts so heavily today? For so very long, Magnus had done nothing but think of his late wife, of his failure. Time has a strange way of numbing the pain, and soon, he only thought of her once a day, then every other. Eventually weeks would go by, the guilt remaining the same despite the passage of time.

Tabitha burst from the building, followed closely by Roberto and Samuel. At the sight of Magnus, Samuel stopped abruptly, Roberto thumping into him and nearly knocking the pair of them to the ground. Roberto had opened his mouth to yell, but stopped and joined Samuel in staring their direction.

At least some of the children had enough sense to behave in his presence, Magnus thought. However, when Sam raised a sheepish hand and waved, Magnus realized he wasn't what had drawn the boys' attention. The pretty companion on his arm waved back, and Samuel's face darkened to the shade of a beet.

Magneto inclined his head towards the children and started them walking again at a leisurely pace. "Some of the younger students" he acknowledged. "In time, when their training is complete, they will join the rest of the X-Men in their work."

"Work?" Rogue uncurled her arm from the crook of his elbow and stopped. When he turned, her hands were on her hips and her eyes had narrowed. "Y'all said this place was a school."

"Instructing mutants in the use of their powers is but one facet of our mission." He started walking up the path again, and heard the huff of breath before her hurried steps followed after.

"And the other part?" she asked.

He mounted the stairs of the building nearest them, an enormous octagon in one corner of the complex that housed their research facilities. Diagonal from them across the massive gardens lay the building that housed the tactical arm, what they called the War Room, along with the hangar bay. The entire complex was connected by a network of underground tunnels, but he was finding the day and her company so pleasant that he hadn't bothered to use them. The sight of the children had inspired his first stop on their tour, the team's training facility.

"The other?" He allowed the corner of his mouth to twitch in what was almost a smile. "Making the world a better place." With a wave of his hand, he opened the doors and motioned her inside. Those green eyes followed him warily as she walked by.

"That's a tall order, mister," she countered.

Twin staircases flanked either side of the stories high vestibule, leading up to the control booth of the Danger Room – what the children called their state of the art gymnasium - or down to the research and hospital facilities. Rogue and Gambit had been examined upon their arrival in a triage infirmary near the hangar bay, merely a pared down version of the more extensive hospital housed below them now.

He moved to the stairs, but stopped when he realized she wasn't following him. Instead, Rogue stood in the entrance hall, transfixed by the flicker of a holographic display. Magneto took a deep breath before he came to stand beside her. The two stood in silence before Rogue finally spoke.

"Who are they?" she asked gently.

On a dais, a holographic imager projected the slightly translucent likenesses of dozens of mutants, one at a time, on a repeating cycle. At the projector's base, an inscription proclaimed _'We will never forget'_.

Magnus cleared his throat. "Those we have lost."

Rogue inhaled sharply and he felt her eyes on him, but he found he couldn't look away from the display as first images of Moira and then Wanda materialized.

"So many," Rogue whispered.

Even though Magnus had begun to forget the sound of some of their voices, of their laughter, their faces still haunted him in his dreams, alongside the starved and lice ridden bodies in the concentration camps of his youth.

"Through grief, we find our inspiration," he stated, "our drive to carry on. Dreams sometimes require great sacrifice."

"And savin' the world?" Rogue's voice had an angry edge. "That was your dream?"

He closed his eyes and bowed his head. "No," Magnus conceded, "I cannot take full credit for such a folly. There was once a man named Xavier…"

" _Xavier_?" the voice was no longer angry, but sounded very small, frightened. When Magnus looked at her, Rogue's eyes were wide, her pupils dilated.

"Yes, Charles Xavier. A far better man than I, even now. This was all his dream, more or less. He sought to teach mutants and humanity to co-exist peacefully, but his contribution to the world remains only as a memory."

"He…he's _dead_?"

"Brain dead. Injured in a tragic accident many years ago. His body, at least what is left of it, resides in this very building. I confess I have not been strong enough to give him the peace he deserves."

Rogue's face paled, and Magnus noticed she was shaking. He reached a hand out for her, but she flinched away. "My dear," he asked, concerned, "are you feeling unwell?"

She forced a smile. "Y'know, I am a little tired. Maybe I should go to my room and get some rest."

The girl was a terrible liar, Magnus realized as he led her back outside. Whatever could have caused such an abrupt change in her behavior?

* * *

 **Remy**

"You done, petite?" Remy snarled.

Jean Grey ripped a silver helmet from her head and tossed it to the floor, where it landed with an echoing thunk.

"Dammit…" she muttered, for the moment not really speaking to him. "I thought with Cerebro for sure…" She closed her eyes and pressed fingertips to her temples, Remy struggling at her feet against invisible bonds. Before he could shout at her for what felt like the hundredth time to let him go, icy telepathic fingers tickled his scalp. Like always, the intruder got nowhere. It hurt, but nothing more than a dull spoon scooping at the border of his consciousness.

"You just give me a headache," Jean muttered behind a curtain of flaming red hair.

"Likewise."

He swallowed another scream, trying to keep his temper in check and keep this girl talking. She was a telepath and a telekinetic, a dangerous rarity in their world, but Remy didn't need to be a mind reader himself to sense something was a bit off about her. She had been questioning him for nearly an hour, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. Far from her playing the role of bad cop, their conversation had become less interrogation, more first date chat. By playing it cool, he had almost gotten more information from her than she had gotten from him. He needed to find Rogue, the worry in his stomach climbing white hot into his throat, but he was reluctant to end his and Jean's little tête-à-tête so quickly, even with the resulting migraine.

Jean had been with Magneto for nearly a decade, her parents seeking the main man's help before there were even X-Men. Jean was one of his first students, her out of control powers the inspiration for the earpieces he had seen the others wearing. The Bluetooth-looking devices blocked telepathy. The development of the technology had led Magneto to other, bigger advances, his work enabling their base to remain hidden all these years from the Shadow King. Still, their overconfidence made Remy uneasy. He doubted their sophisticated system had worked as advertised right out of the box, and wondered what other failures had cost them. Death, enslavement, torture, all of it was waiting for these do-gooders if there was just one tiny fuck up.

According to Jean, the X-Men's sanctuary was massive, capable of housing thousands of mutants, but Remy hadn't seen more than a couple dozen since their arrival. Across the world, hundreds of mutants were being slaughtered or brainwashed every day by Farouk's people. All the empty space here seemed like such a waste. Why would anybody come seeking refuge in Antarctica? And what crazy fool believed in the myth of the X-Men enough to look? From what Jean told him, most of the towers were filled with empty rooms just waiting to be filled. What Remy wouldn't have given in those lonely, desperate days after Jean-Luc's murder to have a place like this to call home.

Though they were smack dab in the middle of Antarctica, the jungle itself was kept tropical by a ring of volcanoes, and had been sheltered from the asteroid that had done in the dinosaurs on the rest of the planet. It had existed for ages, unspoiled until Magneto had found it and turned it into the X-Men's base. Remy didn't want to ask what had made the man look to the ends of the Earth for someplace to hide his students, but he had a few guesses. He didn't know if he should feel warm and safe, or trapped. A gilded cage was still a cage.

The older mutants did double duty as X-Men and as teachers. The younger kids trained to join their ranks when they came of age, put through their paces in something called 'the Danger Room'. According to Jean, there were other X-Men beyond those he and Rogue had been introduced to, most of these were out searching for strays to bring home. Mutants didn't get to the Savageland because the X-Men just happened to be passing by, despite what Polaris had said.

"We can't scan too deep, or too often," Jean looked to be giving up her efforts on his brain for the moment, though her hold on his body didn't slacken. She picked up the ridiculous bike helmet from the floor and inspected it, gesturing to the panel in front of her mechanical chair, which was covered in a rainbow of flashing lights. "We have to skim the astral plane to look for mutants in a passive way, reacting rather than probing, or Farouk and his telepaths would feel us and be able to trace the signal back."

"Sounds like risky business," Remy retorted. "But, Magneto found you all first. Not everybody else in the world so lucky."

The chair was on the floor in the center of a large, cylindrical room. Over their heads was a holographic projection of a globe, and he turned to watch the pinpoint red lights dancing over the Earth's landmasses. He shivered. The astral plane. Remy had always thought it was just a bunch of hippy-dippy garbage, but it was apparently the real deal – a separate realm of psychic energy where the mind readers of the world could get to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

"If you say so," Jean replied.

He spun and glowered at Jean.

"I need to find my friend," he said sternly.

"You care about her," she frowned and stared vacantly at the dancing lights.

Remy' stomach lurched and he stared at the girl. "Thought you couldn't hear me, petite?"

"I can't," she said, "but I'm not an idiot. Sounds like you two have been through a lot. I bet there aren't many people a guy like you gets close to, not for real anyway. But, something's holding you back? Stopping you from getting closer?" Jean frowned like she was trying to fit together the pieces of a puzzle. Girl looked like she might chase a butterfly straight off of a cliff, but Remy was finding Jean perceptive in different ways.

"Well, I just met her, and we been running for our lives the whole time, but…yeah," he confessed. "Her mutant powers are stoppin' us from getting closer, literally. She can't touch nobody wit' out absorbing their powers and minds, knockin' 'em clean out. She can't control it."

"Do you need to touch to be together?"

Before he could answer, Jean stood and headed for the door, pulling his body behind her like a child dragging a toy, his protests locked behind telekinetically frozen lips. His struggles got him nowhere. He had managed to kinetically charge his gloves, though he had the distinct feeling that if he let the charge fly, the blast would stay right with him and tear him to pieces.

In another maze of corridors, they paused before a large sliding door, its metallic surface a bright white. Alongside it, Jean punched a code into a control panel, and the door opened like Star Trek. His cries were little more than gurgles, though Jean seemed to get the gist.

"This is the White Room," she announced and floated him towards the open entrance. The room beyond was large - high ceilings, no windows, every scrap of everything inside a glaring, gleaming white, the walls, the furniture, even the area rug covering the tiles on the floor.

Remy managed a snort.

"I agree," Jean said absently, continuing to stare ahead. "It hits the nail a little too on the head for me - and I'm really more of an ecru girl myself – but, I find this place very…relaxing." Big green eyes and a smile that looked like the cat that ate the canary turned to him. "You've had a long day. Why don't you make yourself at home?"

She got into a batting stance and swung, a telekinetic smack sending Remy flying like a foul ball into the room , where he landed in an upside down heap on the couch. His head sank between the cushions and he thrashed his arms, struggling to free himself from the mountain of white, downy throw pillows. He flipped his feet onto the floor and pulled his head out of the quicksand in time to see Jean wave through the closing doors.

"Sit tight!" she sang.

"Wait! Don't -!" He scrambled for the doors, his hand closing around the nearest weapon, one of the white pillows, but when he tried to light it up, nothing happened.

Remy skidded to a stop. Ignoring the hiss of the doors locking him in, he held the pillow out in front of him and concentrated. When he tried to charge it, nada.

"What the…?" He tried again, but it was the same result. It had to be the pillow, Remy thought, some organic filled nonsense or something to prevent his charge. He pulled a playing card from his pocket, but was horrified to find more of the same.

He threw the pillow at the door. "What did you do to me, woman?!" he roared, the only answer the echo of his own voice.

* * *

 **Raven**

"Wake up, darling."

Curtains thrown wide brought the horrible truth of daylight to Raven's eyes. Instead of embracing the warmth, she buried her face against the overstuffed feather pillow that reeked of gardenias.

The weight of a body dipped onto the bed beside her, and small hands tugged the silken sheet from her shoulder.

"You have to get up. Allison. We don't want to keep the King waiting."

Raven lifted her head, Emma Frost's waspish smile taking form in the blinding midday sun. It appeared that after days of Frost's humiliating interrogations, the Dazzler had finally been deemed worthy of a performance in the Shadow King's throne room.

Emma brushed the sleep tousled hair from Raven's forehead. "I've drawn a bath and laid out something for you to wear. We certainly want to make a good impression, don't we?"

Raven nodded, keeping the scared little bunny expression on her borrowed face. It had taken time, but she had convinced Emma Frost that she wasn't a threat, despite her Elixir induced immunity to telepathy. It hadn't been easy, but things like pride and principles hardly mattered anymore. Avenging Irene was the only thing that kept the blood flowing through her veins.

Emma leaned forward and pressed her lips to Raven's. One of her hands trailed under the sheet to caress Raven's bare thigh, and Raven had to remind herself not to snap the woman's wrist. Whatever it took, she told herself. She would make Farouk pay if it was the last thing she did.

"Mmmm," Frost pulled back and licked her lips. "As much as I would love to join you, darling, we must really hurry."

The water in the bath wasn't hot enough to wash away all the things Raven had been forced to do since her arrival. Silk sheets aside, she was a prisoner, and had been firmly caged in Frost's suite since her arrival. Part of Raven was kicking herself for getting into such a mess. She easily could have slit Frost's throat by now and headed off to do the same to Farouk, but she wasn't sure she could make it to the Shadow King before she was discovered. The job had to be quick, but there had to be no doubt the fat fuck would die on the end of her blade before one of his flunkies killed her in the process. She needed to stay the course, to let Frost bring her close enough to Farouk that there would be no mistakes, no room for error. She wanted to watch him twitch, to see him suffer for all he had taken from her.

The "outfit" Emma had laid out for her to wear was just one more humiliating objectification among too many to count. The teal silk dress was little more than a scarf that wound around her neck and draped down her breasts before spilling to the floor. Two generous slits ran up her legs, the sides of the dress held together with ornate gold clasps at her hips. Alone in the room, Raven concentrated, and her hair and makeup slid into place without her lifting a finger. One of many benefits of her shapeshifting abilities was a never ending supply of good hair days. She could look however she wanted, and took advantage of it when she could.

What she wouldn't erase were the scars that ran up Allison's arms. Those had been seen in public too many times for them to mysteriously disappear, a part of the urban legend of the Dazzler. Raven instead displayed them like a badge of honor. After all, Allison Blaire had died so Raven could stand in Farouk's presence, and she would never forget that. She owed Dazzler her vengeance.

Emma, dressed in a strapless white gown and flanked by two guards, led Raven from her chambers to an elevator. Raven cursed Scalphunter under her breath. There had been an _elevator_ to Frost's rooms, but John Greycrow had instead hauled her up endless flights of stairs with her head slapping against his ass. He was a dead man.

At the ground floor, the elevator opened onto a spacious courtyard, every square inch decorated with ornate geometric patterns. In the center stood a large fountain surrounded by trees heavy with oranges and lemons. They began walking across the space, and Raven could see the halls and archways of the palace floors above that opened onto the center square. Swarms of mutants were buzzing along the walkways, some gathering in small groups around the fountain and beneath the intricately carved arches. Gleaming gold adorned most surfaces, mixed with a palette of blues - the colors of the sea. Raven hated to admit that something so beautiful, so serene and peaceful, could house the most destructive being the world had ever known. But, the building was old, almost ancient. Farouk hadn't built this palace, she reminded herself. He had stolen it, along with everything else.

She followed Emma through a massive archway, the room beyond capped by an enormous dome. Throngs of people circulated through the dimly lit space, the women as scantily clad as Raven, the men heavily armed, some guarding the entrances. Most present were mutants with obvious signs of their powers on display, but there were a few exotically beautiful humans serving trays laden with food and drinks.

The focus of the room was a dais upon which sat Amahl Farouk, the oversized slug stuffed into a set of strained silk pajamas and oozing over a backless embroidered couch. Raven had never seen him so close, only pictures and videos of him these last decades. She fought the urge to rush onto the platform and murder him with whatever she could lay her hands on. He deserved to die, but there was still no guarantee Raven could finish him off before someone stopped her. She would have to bide her time until she could get physically close enough. And, there was still the problem of what had happened to Rogue. There had been no sign or further mention of the girl, and Raven had been lucky enough to steer clear of Logan so far, if he had even survived the trip to Cairo, but she couldn't just leave the girl's fate up in the air. If she could, she needed to make sure Rogue was safe before the end. She owed it to Irene and the little girl they had both loved.

Standing behind Farouk was Storm, alongside a pale, purple haired woman Raven didn't recognize. There were a pair of buxom beauties with vacant eyes cooling the King with ostrich feather fans, and at his elbow, another young woman sat on her knees and fed him grapes.

Raven guessed the girl was barely older than Rogue, and calling the scant whisper of fabric she was wearing an outfit was being generous. The dark red color of her bikini complimented a mass of auburn curls, held back from a pretty but dejected face by a matching headband. Her wrists were bound together with heavy chains, and she wore an inhibitor collar around her neck that blinked electronic lights. Raven nearly threw up when Farouk sucked a grape from the girl's fingers.

The collar drew her attention again. It was rumored that Farouk's minions used power inhibiting technology as part of their 'rehabilitation', but the girl seemed to be the only one in the room wearing one. Why would the King bother keeping a de-powered mutant at his feet? If she was under Farouk's telepathic control, why would they need to lock down her powers? Could the girl still be free of his mind control?

Emma squeezed her hand, mistaking Raven's quaking rage for nerves. "Just as we practiced," Emma whispered. "Do not fail me."

Not only Raven's life depended on a successful performance. Frost had vouched for her and put herself on the line, but why? Without mutant powers – or rather without evidence of the Dazzler's working mutant powers - Emma had deemed her safe, but both of their lives depended on Raven's good behavior. Raven wished she could figure out Frost's angle, but was thankful she had been able to convince Frost of both her sincerity and the Dazzler's power loss, or she would have had a collar all her own, and Farouk's people would have gotten a blue-skinned surprise.

When she released Raven's fingers, Emma stepped forward. "Your majesty," she bowed low, "may I present - for your amusement - The Dazzler."

Stepping onto the platform, Emma took her place between Storm and the unfamiliar purple haired woman. The three of them together were Farouk's most loyal subjects, Frost and the other woman his prized telepaths. The King had made most psionic abilities illegal, and destroyed anyone sheltering a mutant with powers that could challenge his own. Rumor was he had kept women close to him that had such talents, and these women served as his protectors.

 _As Time Goes By_ was the song Raven sang acapella, pouring every bit of heartache and pain she could muster through her copied windpipes. The song was a favorite of Farouk's according to Emma, the bastard the Dazzler's number one fan, and Raven knew she had hit a home run when the fat fuck stopped eating long enough to watch her with greedy, piggy eyes. When the song finished, he clapped gleefully, the motions threatening to rupture the buttons of his pajama top.

"Splendid!" Farouk was unable to turn his head atop the rolls of his neck, but addressed Frost over the mound of his shoulder. "You were right, Emma. She will be perfect for…"

He was interrupted by a commotion behind Raven, and when she turned, the crowd parted to make way for an unnaturally pale-faced man flanked by two younger men - a brunette and a blonde. The brunette wore dark red glasses and carried a metal briefcase.

"Ahhh, Nathaniel!" Farouk purred and clasped his hands together atop his globular stomach.

Raven stepped to the side, and the young men stopped to stand beside her, but the pale man, his dark hair slicked back into a ponytail, continued forward. He stepped onto the platform and took a knee in front of the King.

"My Lord." The man, his mouth framed by an equally dark goatee, kissed the swollen hand Farouk offered him.

Farouk's beady eyes glistened. "I trust you have brought with you good news?"

The man's smile, even in profile, sent shivers down Raven's spine, and her mind raced to put a surname to the ghoulish face.

"My liege," Nathaniel's voice was honey over rusty razor blades, "perhaps that is a discussion better held in private?"

Farouk's laugh sent tremors rippling across silk. "Always my best interest at heart, eh doctor? Very well. Ororo?" Storm was at his elbow so fast Raven hadn't seen her move. "Would you…?" Farouk merely waved his hand, and Storm nodded. She stepped to the front of the platform and clapped, thunder booming overhead from the clear sky.

"Leave us," she commanded, and the room obeyed. Most of the mutants rushed to the exits in a wave, but those closest to Farouk stood in their place, including Frost. Unsure of where to go without her, Raven tried to catch Emma's gaze, but met Farouk's instead.

"Ah, yes," he smiled. "We cannot forget our little songbird." He inclined his head. "Wanda?"

The girl chained at his side got onto her knees and leaned towards him.

"Wanda, be a dear, and show our new friend where she will be sleeping."

Wanda nodded and rose, stepping gracefully towards Raven despite the heavy chains weighing down her wrists.

Behind Farouk, Emma's face colored, her thickly painted lips drawing a tight line. Raven wasn't her plaything anymore. Frost wasn't thrilled, but there was nothing she could do about it. Raven had to control the inappropriate smile that threatened the corners of her mouth.

"Come with me, please." Wanda's voice held the traces of an Eastern European accent, and she took hold of Raven's elbow with a firm grip.

As she was steered from the room, Raven tried to register as much of what was happening as she could. Farouk's telepaths and Storm had stayed, along with the doctor and his young beefcakes. The boys had joined their companion on the platform, and the brown haired one had presented the metal briefcase to the doctor.

"I am capable of delivering what you ask for," she heard the doctor say, but Wanda was pushing her from the throne room too fast.

Obviously the wheezing old slug could use a doctor, but something else was going on. Raven needed to hear more. To stop Wanda's hustle, Raven tripped on the hem of her own dress and fell onto her knees.

"Oh!" she whispered and clutched at Wanda's chains, dragging her down with her.

"We must go!" A panicked Wanda pulled Raven to her feet, but over the girl's shoulder she saw the doctor approach Farouk with an empty syringe.

"All is proceeding according to plan," he said. "There is just one more thing that I require…"


End file.
